Tag Archives: renewable energy

Day 3 – World Peace

Day 1 and Day 2 of my plan are done.

Day 3 “Probably write an informative piece about world peace. Though possibly not that informative, and possibly a different subject.” Has not yet come to fruition as I seem to have gone straight to Day 5 “Don’t blog. Watch TV.”

In some contexts it is good to make faster progress than anticipated, but in the case of this plan I feel this may not be the an accurate representation of success.

So it’s back to Day 3 and a discussion on World Peace. I’ve spent several days thinking about it and have reluctantly come to the conclusion that we will never achieve it. We may as well just start an arms race and lay waste to the Earth. As Einstein is reputed to have said “I don’t know what weapons the Third World War will be fought with, But the Fourth will be fought with sticks and stones.”

Sometimes you just can’t help a world which won’t listen.

This, of course, won’t be an easy policy to sell.

As a gentler choice, I would like to push the benefits of renewable energy. If there is no need for fossil fuels we might be able to preserve the world a little longer and make World Peace something worth having. We would also remove the question of oil from politics. We all have access to wind and sunlight, which should make things simpler.

It would, of course, be harder to impose sanctions on producers of oil (Russia, being a case in point). But it would be simpler in other ways, as Europe would not have become reliant on Russian gas. I blunder through life as a happy idiot, but even I could see that importing gas from Russia was bound to be problem eventually. Importing energy is a bad policy, full stop.

And there you have my policy for World Peace – more renewable energy. Politicians will then have to find something else to quarrel about. I predict water will be the one, so let’s start desalinating now, before Water War 1 breaks out.

This is officially “Day 3” for planning purposes, for those of you who are keeping count.

The picture choice? When the whole world is left in ruins, we will still have soup.

Day 127

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I failed to win last night’s lottery draw and forgot to buy a ticket for tonight. As a result I am £2.50 poorer than I would have been if I hadn’t bothered at all. Normally I don’t bother, but the thought of winning £160,000,000 tempted me into buying a ticket.

This means that plans to live in an air-conditioned bubble and exist renewable energy will have to be put on hold.

It’s strange how plans change. If I’d won the lottery when I was 24, sports cars, wine, women and song would have featured heavily in my plans. If I’d won at 44 my plans would have centred round Julia and the kids. Now, at 64, I appear to have changed into a slightly demented hermit. The funny thing is that I’m happy with the idea and am starting to see where Elon Musk gets his ideas from.

I’m not even sure if I’d want to leave work if I won the lottery. It’s not like it’s unpleasant being a coin dealer, and I don’t have much else to do. Since Covid and the rise in fuel prices caused by the war in Ukraine I don’t want to go out as much so if it wasn’t for work life would be very dull. I don’t even do my own shopping these days.

I’m not sure there’s much we really need. I doubt I’ll be allowed to build an air-conditioned bubble so I’ll probably just buy a bungalow with solar panels. It’s not quite so much fun as a sports car but sometimes you have to face facts – we have to save the earth, and with my knees I really don’t see a sports car as a realistic option these days.

Day 34

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Very little to say today. This partly because nothing much happened. It was a bit warmer. I feel a bit better. We liquidised last night’s vegetable stew and had vegetable soup for tea. We also had two short-dated fruit tarts which Julia had bought for a few pence yesterday. They were undoubtedly bad for us but we enjoyed them, and at least there was some fruit involved.

Gas prices have gone up massively, which wasn’t a surprise. They are not guaranteed to go down either, which was not a surprise either. They seldom do. The government isn’t doing much to help with gas prices, I am told, but to be honest I wasn’t aware that government’s job was to pay for my heating.

Government’s job in the past was to build nuclear power stations so we could generate electricity, but nobody wanted them to do that. Maybe they should now be encouraging wind power, but everyone whines about windmills spoiling their view.

They should encourage solar panels, by making it a condition of planning permission that all new homes should have solar panels as standard. A hundred acres of solar panels taking up farm land is a problem, but a hundred acres of solar panels on roofs won’t harm anyone.

Then, if they can just find a way for people to run their gas heating systems using renewable electricity we will all be laughing. That’s a point that the renewable energy spokesman missed in his press release this afternoon. How exactly does renewable electricity make my gas fire work?

I’m glad I’m not the one who has to sort it all out.

The picture is from February 2019. Was it only three years ago that we considered going out for tea and scones to be a pleasurable pursuit rather than a dangerous sport?

One Day, Three Posts

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Links in case you missed the first and second posts.

I’m watching Family Fortunes. It’s comforting to know that although many species are threatened by extinction we still have a thriving population of idiots. If we could work out a way to generate electricity from them we would be in a really good position to stop depleting the world’s resources. Obviously I mean a socially acceptable way of generating electricity. Merely forking them into a massive incinerator would be easy and direct, but would probably encounter opposition. I’m also unclear on the release of carbon dioxide from burning idiots. It’s probably better to put up massive multi-storey buildings full of bicycles linked to generators and make the idiots pedal. It will take idiots off the streets and give them something useful to do. When you think of the potential of idiots to breed more idiots it is definitely a renewable energy resource.

First one up for my new idiot treatment will be Boris Johnson. He’s reportedly going to resign as Prime Minister next year as he can’t manage on his £150,000 pa salary. That’s what he thinks. My plans for him are slightly different. He’s lied to us about Brexit, he’s lied and backstabbed his way to the top, he’s cultivated Dominic Cummings like some vile germ, he’s completely lost it when called on for Covid leadership and now, after having a go at being PM, he’s bored and he wants to go so he can jump on the lecture circuit.

A lifetime spent cycling so I can have cheap electricity seems a fitting end to the blonde buffoon after the mess he’s made of the country in his pursuit of personal gain, particularly if he had to exist on minimum wage. We could cuff him to the bike like a galley slave and make him pedal off his debt to society.

If I tell you that I’d use my cheap electricity to charge a cattle prod, can you guess where I’d shove it?

Thoughts about renewable energy

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I watched The Apprentice last night.

At one time I used to watch in the hope that I might learn something about business. I’ve not learned anything I can use, though I do now know that every year proves there is a seemingly endless supply of idiots.

If I can find a way of converting idiots into electricity I may have found the next big thing in renewable energy.

Talking of which, we drove past another solar farm today. It seems like every time we drive north from Nottingham we find another new field of black panels. Land use has changed considerably over the last ten years in North Nottinghamshire – first we had willow, then we had miscanthus. Currently we seem to have a small forest of wind turbines springing up and the latest fashion seems to be to cover acres in photovoltaic cells.

Solar farm in north Nottinghamshire

When I see that I feel more comfortable about using electricity, but then start to worry that we won’t need it, because if we cover the land to generate electricity there will be no food to cook.

I’m a bit worried about food, after listening to a radio programme tonight. In order to halt global warming we need to scale back on meat production (mainly on account of the methane produced by cows) and would, they calculate, only have 19 grams of meat a day. That’s 133g a week, about the weight of two moderate burgers.

In the Second World War the bacon and ham ration ranged between 113 and 227 grams. However, there was also a meat ration, controlled by price – between 1 shilling and 1 shilling and two pence (5 – 6 pence in modern terms). I’m struggling to find a comparison of prices – one I found suggests that could be about £1.50. It’s not a lot, but compared to 19 grams a day it’s a positive feast.

To add to the complexity of looking into the future it also seems that grass fed beef (as generally reared in the UK) is worse for the environment than intensively raised beef fed on maize and soya (as raised in USA). It’s not about the method or the food, it’s about the fact that grass fed beef takes longer to grow to full weight, and thus spends more time emitting methane.

Now, methane is the main component of natural gas, so is it just me, or are other people thinking that some sort of gas-collecting nappy on a cow might be an alternative to fracking? Ah, just me…

That’s not the end to it of course, there’s also milk to consider. If they were telling the truth (and I fear they are) we will only have enough milk for four cups of tea a day.

Four cups of tea a day?

I could see myself as a vegetarian, but I don’t see myself cutting down to four cups a day.

Under threat – my cup of tea

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Life after the Care Farm