Environment: Rishi Sunak - politics and realism - what we would like to do, what we can do

 

As people walk away from religion, new cults arise and the environment has become a cult and the messiahs of such cult don't have to be in charge of making hard decisions that need to be made to keep countries going.

I would like to have a mansion in Monaco, a very big yatcht, round the year vacations around the world in picturesque places while staying in six star hotels. Can I do it? Can you do it? The vast majority of us cannot.

As Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak has the duty to bring us down to earth, to stop dreaming impossible dreams, to deal with reality and reality tells that that the mount of electricity and infra-structure needed for a radical transformation of society to get rid of all fossil fuel consumption is beyond our means. The National Grid with all the additional energy supplies proved by existing sources cannot cope because electricity demands vastly surpass whatever we can produce. Not even nuclear energy can provide such enormous supply of energy and what ordinary people should become aware of is the fact that having an electric car will increase your taxes and your electricity bills since in vast majority of cases you will have to plug your vehicles to the same energy infrastructure used to provide electricity to your homes. Taxes on electric vehicles and on the use of electric vehicles are already rising for a very simple reason. The taxes applied to fossil fuel vehicles will be applied to electric vehicles. In London of all places, consumers have been hit by a whole package of new taxes. They were paying Congestion Charge, parking costs, added to the costs of running vehicles and now they will have to pay for ULEZ, and to park cars in front of their own homes. On top of that, the parking costs paid by private companies to provide services to other companies and residential properties are going to be added to bills for delivery, house refurbishments, and other basic services. So it is a never ending cycle of paying tax, tax and more tax that will exhaust consumers. Regardless of any income increases, taxes are eating away private incomes and this includes pension payments that people receive when they retire.

So delaying the implementation of measures that are beyond the scope of reality is a very sensible thing to do and this is exactly what the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has just announced. The messiahs of the new environment cult can say whatever they want. They don't have to make harsh decisions. They don't have to be accountable. Some like to constantly talk about impending doom and live in a world of their own. They constantly talk about what they would like to do, but they never talk about the economic and social costs of what they are proposing.

 

Strikes: winners and losers

 

Strikes: winners and losers

The coming months will see more strikes in Britain and this will include not only transport but also state administration, National Health Service, Education and other segments of the British economy. The idea is that workers want better deals to lose less of the value of their incomes being eroded by the inflationary process created by sanctions against the Russian Federation.

One of the outcomes has been the downgrading of the education system with most education centres having gone done in terms of education standards and there is more to come when teachers go on strike. To the damage caused by the Covid Pandemic will be added the damage caused by absenteism from classrooms caused by strikes. This is going to be also a difficult time for working families and many will face the dilemma of going to work, leaving their children alone outside schools or staying home to look after their families. This will also pose serious social risks. Having children without education and without adult supervision roaming around with little to do is certainly a recipe for disaster. 

We cannot entirely blame workers concerned about their incomes, but the very shortsighted approach of administrations that completely underestimated the impact of geopolitical decisions. Everybody with a grain of common sense could foresee that economic warfare would have repercussions not only for the British economy, but for the world's economy as a whole.  Even France with its nuclear power advantage is in dire straits as the vast majority of French nuclear reactors are not operational and this led to a direct confrontation between the French authorities and energy providers when French authorities tried to force energy providers to provide electricity at below operational margins. Similar situations occur across continental Europe and Winter has not even arrived. As temperatures fall, the true extent of the energy crisis will be felt and words like rationing and blackouts. Those who remember the early 1970's in Britain will know fairly well what it means. At one point, Britain was working three days a week. In Britain, temporary aid has been provided to help both ordinary consumers and companies deal with the brunt of energy prices but, unless such schemes are intended to be a permanent feature, sooner than later the real costs of energy will be felt across the board.

So what do strikes achieve? To begin with, those who are going to bear the brunt of strikes are going to be the most vulnerable and especially those who are part of the Zero Hour Contract economy and the black economy. With reduced economic activity, they are going to struggle to survive. Recession could soon be followed by Depression and we also what Depression means. In a recession, economic activity is severely affected but continues. In a Depression, the ultimate consequence is massive levels of unemployment. The hospitality industries - for example, were critically affected by lockdown measures during the pandemic. After that, they have had to deal with higher energy prices and many businesses came to an abrupt end. If now they to have to deal with higher energy prices and margins that do not cover their operational costs, for a vast number of businesses this will be the end game.

Any temporary gains will be followed by gigantic losses. In an economy with skyrocketting levels of borrowing, any salary increases will be swallowed by inflation.

Environmental gatherings: Saving the planet?

Environmental summits are no more than grandiose talking shops for picture opportunities and empty promises and am sure that mass media loved them because they give them something to write about without much effort and surely there is a crowd worldwide eager to swallow every fib that comes out of magnificent wastes of time.

Headlines like 'tens of billions needed to save the planet' might sound impressive - am sure they sound impressive - but they are as impressive as meaningless as no country in the world will ever consider spending such amounts of money that will surely come from additional borrowing that would lead them to implement austerity policies that no one likes to implement because they usually land those who try to implement into deep water. 

Questions that are seldom asked include 'who is going to get such amount of money and what they would be suposed to do with it?'. The 'what for', 'how' and issues of accountability are non existing. As soons the the mass media circus is over, it will be business as usual until the next mass media circus. 

After the mass media circus, the real issues of everyday life will once again be on the table. Ladies and Gentlemen, we have an energy crisis. Germany is said to be in talks with United Kingdom to seek gas supplies - Germany does not have enough storage capacity for liquidified gas and even if Germany had enough storage capacity the amount of energy obtained from liquidified gas is quickly reduced by the same process of turning liquified gas into usable gas. This putting aside issues involving transportation of liquified gas done with a lot of fossil fuels. All those ships that carry liquified gas use fossil fuels and this has a cost. The cost of maritime transport has gone up considerably to the point that bringing in goods from faraway places has become extremely onerous reducing commercial margins generated by low production costs abroad. Perhaps the German move to transfer production to China was inspired by the fact that bringing factories closer to raw materials will allow them to reduce production cost a lot more. Scania made a similar move years ago when much of the operation was transferred to Brazil. Brazil needed trucks and it was easier and cheaper to produce trucks in Brazil that incidentally was going to be a major market for Swedish trucks.

The other issue that lies around is fracking. For all the talk about fracking producing earthquakes, you would need specially sensitive equipment to detect such 'earthquakes', and obviously ordinary people who don't have such equipment will hardly ever know about the said 'earthquakes'. Mass media have been very active creating an artificial monster out of gullible minds that are very willing to believe whatever horror story they are told. Although fracking will not provide immediate results in terms of increasing energy supplies, it is something to take into consideration when energy supplies are going down. Nuclear energy is a certain possibility but it takes decades for a nuclear plant to be built to produce the energy that we desperately need. We need energy now. This is one of the subjects Germany will be discussing with Britain to avoid what now look like unavoidable blackouts in the biggest manufacturing country in Europe.