Thoughts?

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CELTIC SEA – shaded area.
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Clean up our rivers, then save the world

• Western Mail (Wales) & South Wales Echo (Cardiff region)7 Oct 2024
• IN MY opinion, Wales’ devolved Labour government pays too much attention to its rush into a zerocarbon economy, and its proclaimed main aim as getting little Wales to be the “world leader” in averting global climate disaster.
• The First Minister, Eluned Morgan MS, has appointed her Deputy First Minister, Huw Irranca-Davies MS, to a senior cabinet position as Minister for Climate Change and Rural Affairs – confirming the excess interest that she and her party put on averting climate change. Similarly, UK Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer MP, has appointed Ed Miliband MP to the senior cabinet position in the UK Government as Secretary of State for Energy Security and Net-Zero.
• I’ve made a list below, in alphabetic order, of 33 major issues the planet faces for its survival and for all creatures who live on it, including humans.
• There may some glaring omissions, but here it is in no order of priority: Abuse of any species; asteroid collisions; atmospheric pollution; climate change; deforestation; dictatorships; earthquakes and tsunamis; economic collapse; energy crisis; epidemics; exhausting world resources; extinction of species; faith belief loss; famine; fanaticism; flooding; genocide; Ice Age return; inequality; marine ocean pollution; microplastics; pandemics; plague; population extremes; poverty; river pollution; recycling sustainability; slavery; starvation; terrorism; volcanoes; war; wildfires.
• Put these in order of priority that you consider most urgent and possibly preventable.
• Some of these are beyond the control of any human or government, eg asteroid collision and volcanoes and earthquakes and tsunamis. Others can only be averted in large scale by intervention by governments of major countries, eg deforestation of the Amazon basin area or atmospheric pollution by China, India and USA. Others can be controlled by democracy and joint governments of many countries acting together, like war.
• Small countries like Wales can only make a difference by small-scale local actions like clearing up its rivers and local flooding. There is no way in reality that little Wales can become a global leader in averting global climate change or take up the role leading the world in preaching the “green gospel” mantra.
• That being so, the Wales Labour government, together with Ed Miliband in the UK Government, should stop ruining our scenic landscape with erratic unreliable wind turbines and destroying food producing farmland with ineffective foreign solar panels.
• Start with reality and clean up our rivers first to show your credibility.
• I. Richard, Craigcefnparc, Swansea.
• *********************************

We’re still indirectly using coal power

• South Wales Evening Post (Swansea region)7 Oct 2024
• THERE is a free website that shows the up-to-date electrical UK power mix used in the recent past and updated every 15 minutes. Click onto Gridwatch UK to follow our power use and its source mix.
• A simple understanding of units of power is needed and the easiest is the old fashioned example, where a single-bar electric fire needs one kilowatt or 1kw for any one instant.
• If left on for a whole year it becomes 1kw x 365 days x 24 hours or 8,760 kw hrs this can be written as 8.76 Mwhrs as a thousand kilowatts equals one megawatt.
• Our UK grid operates between 25,000 MW and 65,000 MW on “instants” depending on the time of day, fluctuating with commercial and industrial demand and domestic use and the season of the year and hour of day. Generally it is between about 30,000 MW and 45,000 MW but it can spiral to maximum 65,000 MW quite quickly on demand circumstances.
• It constantly changes and its sources fluctuate. Nuclear power is kept stable at about 13,000 MW, whereas gas and wind constantly vie for top place as the wind is so vastly erratic and unreliable that they need each other.
• A large number of other sources contribute in small but important ways such as solar; tidal; biomass and hydro, and even international exchange links to and fro with our neighbouring European countries (France, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway and Belgium) via seabed cables to a total significant capacity of nearly 7,000 MW.
• There is even serious talk of a seabed connector for solar from Morocco. Also we are beginning to see whole fields being used up for giant lithium Life storage batteries near solar and erratic wind power sources linked by new pylon lines to meet urban demand.
• At the time of writing we just shut down our very last reliable coal-fired power station at Ratcliffe-on-soar in Nottinghamshire (capacity 2,000 MW). It is set for immediate demolition, although it has been an essential gap filler right up to this summer when the other sources failed to cope. What is not said, and hidden, is that our international connections all contain a mix of coal-generated power and our neighbours still burn a lot of coal.
• Check the Gridwatch statistics for our neighbours, as listed above. So despite the “greeny glee” at seeing off our steelworks blast furnaces and our last coal power station to create a “carbon zero Britain” (forgetting the essential gas power emissions) we will still have coal power in our grid from Europe.
• To top that, most of our mass of imports of things like white goods and cars come from industrial giants in Asia that rely mostly on coal power. So we in the UK are all complicit in burning huge masses of coal in Asia. Forget the fantasy of powering the country, and its vehicle fleet, with hydrogen. It takes more gas energy to source, store and transport hydrogen than it provides when converted into useful energy, so using anything but vast new renewable sources, true green hydrogen, will require burning more fossil fuels like gas unless we cover our whole nation with erratic, part-time wind turbines.
• Let’s hope that the new Great British Energy gets a true realistic grip on our energy economy.
• I Richard, Craigcefnparc, Swansea.
• **********************************************

A good read.

Point of information: it used to be named the Association of British Drivers before becoming the Alliance of British Drivers (now) when it merged with Peter Roberts’ Drivers’ Alliance after he set up the largest ever response petition (still) on the then Downing Street (now Westminster) Petition website against the proposed introduction of road user charging pay-per-mile motoring in 2007, IIRC.

A petition that might coincidentally rise from the dead this Hallowe’en after the 30th October Budget.

My letter today Saturday 5-10-24 on Western Mail and South Wales Echo.
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We’re still indirectly using coal power

• Western Mail & South Wales Echo5 Oct 2024I Richard, Craigcefnparc, Swansea.

THERE is a free website that shows the up-to-date electrical UK power mix used in the recent past and updated every 15 minutes. Click onto Gridwatch UK to follow our power use and its source mix.
A simple understanding of units of power is needed and the easiest is the old fashioned example, where a single-bar electric fire needs one kilowatt or 1kW for any one instant.
If left on for a whole year it becomes 1kW x 365 days x 24 hours or 8,760 kW hrs this can be written as 8.76 MWhrs as a thousand kilowatts equals one megawatt.
Our UK grid operates between 25,000 MW and 65,000 MW on “instants” depending on the time of day, fluctuating with commercial and industrial demand and domestic use and the season of the year and hour of day. Generally it is between about 30,000 MW and 45,000 MW but it can spiral to maximum 65,000 MW quite quickly on demand circumstances.
It constantly changes and its sources fluctuate. Nuclear power is kept stable at about 13,000 MW, whereas gas and wind constantly vie for top place as the wind is so vastly erratic and unreliable that they need each other. A large number of other sources contribute in small but important ways such as solar; tidal; biomass and hydro, and even international exchange links to and fro with our neighbouring European countries (France, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway and Belgium) via seabed cables to a total significant capacity of nearly 7,000MW. There is even serious talk of a seabed connector for solar from Morocco. Also we are beginning to see whole fields being used up for giant lithium LiFe storage batteries near solar and erratic wind power sources linked by new pylon lines to meet urban demand.
At the time of writing we just shut down our very last reliable coalfired power station at Ratcliffe-onSoar in Nottinghamshire (capacity 2,000 MW). It is set for immediate demolition, although it has been an essential gap filler right up to this summer when the other sources failed to cope. What is not said, and hidden, is that our international connections all contain a mix of coal-generated power and our neighbours still burn a lot of coal.
Check the Gridwatch statistics for our neighbours, as listed above. So despite the “greeny glee” at seeing off our steelworks blast furnaces and our last coal power station to create a “carbon zero Britain” (forgetting the essential gas power emissions) we will still have coal power in our grid from Europe. To top that, most of our mass of imports of things like white goods and cars come from industrial giants in Asia that rely mostly on coal power. So we in the UK are all complicit in burning huge masses of coal in Asia.
Forget the fantasy of powering the country, and its vehicle fleet, with hydrogen. It takes more gas energy to source, store and transport hydrogen than it provides when converted into useful energy, so using anything but vast new renewable sources, true green hydrogen, will require burning more fossil fuels like gas unless we cover our whole nation with erratic, parttime wind turbines. Let’s hope that the new Great British Energy gets a true realistic grip on our energy economy.
********************************************* .end of published letter.
Whilst at it – THINK ABOUT THIS BELOW :-
£21,700,000,000 of our tax to be spent on the new Miliband Mania project:-
Carbon Capture – News Today
News on BBC UK today Friday 4-10-24 Quote below from BBC headline article :-
There is a lot of rousing rhetoric today about carbon capture, following the government’s pledge of £21.7bn of public funds over the next 25 years to help kick-start the industry in the UK.
Around 45 commercial carbon capture and storage facilities are in operation worldwide, together capturing more than 50 million tonnes of CO2 each year, according to the International Energy Agency. That may sound a lot – but global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry currently sit at more than 35 billion tonnes per year.So carbon capture currently makes very little difference to global CO2 emissions.
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Comment below on Carbon Capture – from Ioan Richard 01792 843861 Swansea.
Carbon capture sounds a good idea in principle, putting it down disused empty oil wells. Better than their original mad suggestion of pumping it down into our old coal mines until it was realised nearly all UK old coal mines are full of putrid water in fractured geology, and mass Carbon Dioxide gas escapes would be an obvious outcome. Then there is the magnitude. Just think of the Blast Furnaces that recently shut – they could produce 75,000 tonnes of iron for steel every week and their chemical ‘reduction’ equation using coke (carbon) and iron ore (iron oxide) released 43,000 tonnes of red hot loose carbon dioxide gas every week at Port Talbot into the atmosphere i.e. 2,236,000 tonnes per annum of loose red hot carbon dioxide gas – or two and a quarter million tonnes per annum. If those furnaces had stayed open that would be a lot of capture and long distance transport or pipeline continuously to distant old oil wells. Anyway they are going to spend £21,700,000,000 of our tax on this mammoth trial target. In announcing this, it is a blatant admission that we will continue to use Carbon Chemicals and Carbon Fuels and Carbon generated Power (by gas?) long past their stated deadline of carbon zero targets. Anyway I am not opposing this idea because I know nothing of the capture / storage methods and I know nothing of the stability of the geology of the strata of the old oil wells – are they safe from earthquakes and terrorism attack in war time hostilities forever as they must last sealed to eternity? Yes – lasted safe to eternity! Will China,India and USA follow our lead in this? Look at the glum faces of those in the photo for this Press Release yesterday. Do they look convincing? Anyway I pay little tax on my meagre pension and at the age of 80 yrs I will not be here in 25 yrs but my grandchildren will be middle aged then. I am not opposing this – all I say is – everyone should ask detailed questions, including lazy journalists who just regurgitate  press releases from politicians – before these politicians destroy our economy with any Miliband inspired ideas.

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Photo sourced from BC News site 4-10-24. Both “Dim and Glum” – but “Dim” wearing a nice suit and posh spectacles!
**************************************************************** end.

You’re correct about Gwlad (though I no longer play an active role), and what you suggest on the left is happening on the continent. The problem in the UK might be that that non-mainstream pitch has been queered by Galloway and others. In Wales, it’s difficult to see anything remotely resembling a non-woke, anti-net zero socialism emerging. Where would it come from?

I assume, or at least hope that’s a sliding scale of vices you enumerate there – might have got the point across better if you’d started with easy money and ended with kiddie fiddling!

How about, Gwlad in a position to snatch all the small ‘c’ votes, because that is the party’s raison d’etre isn’t it, to be a home for the conservative minded who are open to the question of the Union.

It’d be very interesting to see an old-school left wing party emerge from the mire too, binning wokeism and being strictly about the good things the Left has brought us throughout history like worker’s rights and facilities for the common good. A party like that with enough momentum would do a number on Labour/Plaid.

The reprogramming gets done by introducing the boys and girls to vices in which they already engage, or in the few lily white cases they get presented with “new experiences” that make them complicit. Kiddie porn, kiddie fiddling, chixwivdix, girls,boys, easy money etc etc all part of the work culture.

It would be the first ever meat, to have been meted out. 🙂

In some ways Corruption Bay is reminiscent of that great movie The Stepford Wives. People go there full of ideas of doing their own thing and get re-programmed, or sucked into the system.