Collapse

He takes quite a long time to get to the point, presumably in the hopes that sunk cost fallacy will enable it to sink in better when he does. Having teed things up by saying that the amount of knowledge to be gained through education, and the amount of energy to be had for human use on the earth’s surface, are both essentially zero-sum games, he comes to the conclusion:

The UK – along with Germany – is leading the charge to test this economics to destruction. As successive governments rip infrastructural foundations like electricity generation, oil and gas refining, virgin steelmaking, and even food production out from beneath the wider economic edifice, it becomes ever more fragile and vulnerable even to the kind of shocks that it would have overcome just a few decades ago. It is, for example, highly unlikely that the UK (and possibly Europe as a whole) could survive another banking and financial system reset on the scale of 2008 (and since the debt load has grown exponentially since then, any crash that does occur will be bigger again). The UK is clearly ill-equipped militarily – following decades of cutbacks, most of its remaining armaments having been shipped off to Ukraine to be destroyed by the Russians, what remains is barely bigger than the military deployed to keep the peace in Northern Ireland in the 1970s. Electricity blackouts are guaranteed now that the last coal-fired power station (which plugged the gap during last December’s cold snap) had closed, leaving the UK grid at the mercy of intermittent wind and even less secure foreign imports. And without massive subsidies our water and transport systems will continue to decay.

Switch to solar = impractical

Stick with coal until the earth becomes unlivable = practical

Apparently.

I think the little dig at Ukraine might be a clue as to what the wider scope of the point he’s trying to make is. Something along the lines of, “‘We’ need to keep buying oil and gas from Russia and stop all this wind power foolishness.”