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Thread | Global Energy Review
at 07:48 27 Jun 2025
The Energy Institute published their annual energy review yesterday and as expected carbon emissions grew just over 1% to 40.8GtCO2e.
https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review
Here are a few excerpts if you don't want to download the report;
"Wind and solar continued to be the fastest-growing areas
of the energy system increasing by 16% in 2024. China was
responsible for 57% of new additions with solar almost
doubling in just two years.
Global rare earth metals mining increased by 3.2% in 2024
reaching 0.4 million tonnes. China maintained its dominance
accounting for 71% of global production and 48% of
worldwide reserves.
China remains the world’s largest single emitter of greenhouse
gases, accounting for around a third of global emissions.
Along with India, it contributed 62% of the increase in global
emissions last year.
The US was the world’s largest oil producer, accounting for
a fifth of global production in 2024.
China displayed signs of oil demand peaking in 2023
registering a 1.2% drop in demand in 2024.
Over the past ten years coal’s share of China’s generation fleet
has fallen from 70% to 58%. In India, its share has remained
fixed at around 75%.
India’s demand for coal rose 4% in 2024 and now equals that
of the CIS, South and Central America, North America, and
Europe combined.
Global natural gas demand returned to growth in 2024 rising
101 bcm (2.5%).
All regions bar Africa saw gas demand rise in 2024."
Emissions in the US and Europe fell during 2024 and the report goes into granular detail on each country's energy use/production. |
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Reply | Britain is spending £24k a year on every adult
at 15:28 17 Jun 2025
Sorry, have to downvote Friedman's BS every time even if you do mention real constraints. Commercial banks create 97% of all money. I'm sure you will want to stop this and have the central bank create all money as per the textbook(Thatcher actually tried full Monetarism and it was a total disaster). Loanable funds has to be one of the worst theories I have come across in economics as when you model it dynamically you get no economic activity.
You should read Nick Stern's paper on how rubbish Neoclassical economists are at climate change and the assumption about people solving an Euler equation when wandering around Asda making consumption choices. How does anyone sit for three/four years learning this stuff and not ask if it's a little far-fetched?
There was even one person on here trying to claim Neoclassical economics is free from ideology. All economics is ideological. |
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Reply | Pensions
at 08:57 29 May 2025
No, it is not unsustainable for a government to fund pensions of public sector workers. Whether there will be a functioning economy to buy goods and services from in the medium to long term is debatable. I will link to a basic definition of why governments can always fund these type of liabilities.
https://theconversation.com/what-is-modern-monetary-theory-an-economist-explains
The private pension industry, however, is quite the problem. The latest report by the pension regulator states,
"Our recent survey indicates that there is still a long tail of schemes where the trustees' knowledge of the scale of financial risks posed by climate change is limited. Where schemes cannot compete on value or governance, we have been clear that the trustees should consider consolidating and exiting the market."
Why is their knowledge so poor on financial risk of climate change? They believed the fantasy modelling by economists on climate impacts. I think the regulator here is putting a certain gloss of the understanding of climate change in the industry as whole. In the insurance industry they use physics-based modelling to understand processes and from that you can apply your risk analysis. I'm not aware of this happening in the pensions industry at all and many are still using the unscientific drivel from economists.
The regulator breaks down risk into three main areas;
"Physical risks relate to the impacts of a changing climate as a result of global average temperature rises and changing weather patterns. These can be divided into acute and chronic physical risks, both of which could impact asset values:
Acute physical risks – include storms and wildfires that cause immediate damage to physical infrastructure and assets together with real-time disruption to supply chains.
Chronic physical risks – these are associated with sustained changes such as increases in the severity and frequency of droughts and flooding. Such changes can cause permanent degradation of agricultural land and supply changes and lead to stranded assets.
Transition risks arise from structural changes in the economy as the UK and other jurisdictions shift towards a low-carbon economy in line with global climate policy goals. The magnitude of risk will be dependent on how quickly and effectively a scheme can adapt and the extent to which there is an orderly or disorderly transition.
Legal and litigation risks may also arise when businesses and investors fail to account for the physical or transition risks of climate change. Risks arise not just for pension schemes with sponsor companies that do not plan and adapt adequately, but also for the pension funds that hold companies’ equity and debt."
The regulator then goes on to discuss some of barriers to progress;
"Physical Risks: Many TCFD reports have previously focused on transition risks in the short to medium term and physical risks in the longer term but have done so in a combined and generic way. However, concerns that physical risks are underestimated have started to increase focus on physical risks, their likely impacts and their potential to arise in the short to medium term.
Stranded Assets: Generally, other than in the context of outline, generic, narratives for qualitative scenarios, the potential for assets to be stranded and the impacts that might have, would benefit from greater consideration.
Nature / Biodiversity: Currently there is no formal mandated requirement for trustees to report on nature related financial risks (TNFD aligned reporting). However, the potential for nature and biodiversity risks to be financially material, the interconnection between nature and climate and the potential for nature to be part of the solution is increasingly being recognised.
Climate Repricing Risk: Apart from some generic references in the context of scenario analysis very few schemes appear to consider the potential for market re-rating of climate risk. Further consideration needs to be given to what the triggers for re-pricing might be and what impacts that re-pricing might have across scheme assets.
Double materiality: The concept that climate-related impacts on a company can be material and requires disclosure is widely accepted. However, the impacts of a company on the climate or wider sustainability issues can also be material. The concept of double materiality has started to become embedded in some sustainable finance disclosure standards but hasn’t generally been reflected in disclosures to date.
Scenario Analysis: The limitations of the initial quantitative scenario analyses carried out by schemes have been recognised and debated within the sector. In response a more qualitative narrative based approach has evolved and is gaining traction. In parallel the approaches to quantitative scenario analysis continue to develop as does the science.
Transition Plans: Government intentions for transition plans for UK regulated financial institutions, including pension schemes are not yet known. However, transition plans, by their forward looking, strategic nature have the potential to catalyse change and help shape investment decisions. Although there is likely to be some lead time before implementation, raising trustee awareness of transition plans and their benefits is an area of ongoing focus for TPR.
Climate related systemic risks: The potential for climate-related systemic risks to build up is an area of interest to the Bank of England’s Financial Policy Committee. There is significant uncertainty around the magnitude of future climate-related financial loses and how and when they might crystallise. Raising trustee awareness of the potential for (climate-related) systemic risks and their potential impacts is also an area of ongoing focus."
Again the stuff on physical risks stems from the belief from economists that damages will be trivial and we can just adapt. The pensions industry is way behind the curve on this and needs to dump the economists and bring onboard climate scientists who can actually inform from a position of reality. I'm not sure growing this industry further in its current state is very logical, and like the insurance industry does now, I think the need for partnership with government is essential to keep these funds viable.
https://www.thepensionsregulator.gov.uk/en/document-library/corporate-informatio |
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Reply | Mosquito-borne viruses in the UK - Part 2
at 08:15 22 May 2025
A team of microbiologists at Exeter have been investigating Vibrio populations in UK coastal and estuarine waters. Vibrio are a type of bacteria that require a sea surface temperature (SST) of 18C or greater and a salinity level below 28 practical salinity units. Climate change is driving SST's higher around the UK and we already observe temperatures above 18C in July and August along the South Coast. Increasing intensification of rainfall can aid a reduction in salinity.
Vibrio parahaemolyticus, which can cause gastroenteritis, is now being found in UK waters.
There is a piece here on the BBC on rising sea surface temperatures around the UK.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c7533y6l3k0o |
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Reply | Reform Policy
at 15:10 7 May 2025
Why do you keep referencing the OBR?
Look at this nonsense I have found on climate change.
https://obr.uk/docs/dlm_uploads/Fiscal-risks-and-sustainability-report-September
Page 31 Box 2.2 Estimating the Economic Costs of Physical Damages
Their main reference is Richard Tol. This is the chap who claims a shutdown of Amoc will be economically beneficial to the UK. I know your understanding of climate science is very limited, despite once telling me you had modelled climate change, but even you must have the research skills to understand how bad Amoc shutdown would be for the UK. Tol's work has been totally discredited by climate scientists so why does the OBR use Tol do you think? Is the OBR at all credible on climate change? If it isn't credible on climate change, how is it credible on anything else?
https://www.desmog.com/richard-tol/
You keep popping up with the same old rant and it is getting rather tedious. You're entitled to an opinion, but clearly just to keep many families functional we need lots of people to do certain jobs. I can't possibly see any benefit to what you are suggesting other than highly skilled people having to take more time off work or having to give up work all together. I teach system dynamics so may be you can write down some differential equations or link some model output to show how this whole scenario plays out and so I don't think I'm talking to a person that doesn't remotely possess the skills to make a determination on this issue. |
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Reply | for all the people who suggest we shouldn't criticise reform or their voters
at 13:40 4 May 2025
I know a couple of engineers that worked in oil and gas industry who have moved into research. One works as a senior climate scientist and the other at the Bank of England research department. I think engineers are intuitive problem solvers and have the maths background to go into physics or financial modelling.
I don't know whether you read James Hansen's recent paper, but if he is right and we are committed to 2C of warming then "bloody awful" would be an apt description of the impacts. |
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Reply | Reform
at 20:26 2 May 2025
You posted nonsense about fiscal rules and this garbage on immigration. Simon, who I don't agree with on economics and what is required to tackle the mounting challenges, is always incredibly polite explaining Neoclassical theories - he knows his onions. Your understanding is just amateurish nonsense and bares no resemblance to the professionals that assist me.
If you ever feel like presenting your objections to ergodicity economics let me know, I could do with a laugh after seeing the total lack of effort this government has put into adaptation.
One thing I never understand is why there is such a lack of transparency; no references, no context to why you think what you do. Can you give me the name of a living economist that you think is credible?
Oh and you have just talked past Stokie and not directly addressed his points. |
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Reply | Lib Dem Results looking handy this afternoon
at 15:36 2 May 2025
Nice to see the Greens doing well in Exeter where the Global Systems Institute and Met Office have been working hard to engage the public on climate change.
I have been impressed with my Lib Dem MP on climate issues, homelessness, poverty and cuts to the adoption and guardianship support fund. Glad I lent them my vote at the last GE. |
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Reply | Net Zero and Tony Blair.
at 13:05 30 Apr 2025
The Blair Institute report was written by somebody with a music undergraduate degree and a PhD in sociology. It is amateurish and full of myths. It only tackles one of the nine planetary boundaries. It is yet another attack on STEM experts. Don't get me started on the standard of work by social scientists on climate change.
Carbon capture is predominantly used for enhanced oil recovery.
Very sad to see the tree planting work of conservationists loss in the recent wildfires in Scotland. As Kevin Anderson always says, "Plant trees for tree reasons, not for climate change." |
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Reply | Trump admitting his business pals made billions over the last few days
at 19:54 14 Apr 2025
The economist stated that Neoclassical theory expects a fall in yields under these conditions. The observation was a rise in yields. The theory is bunk.
Could explain how Neoclassical models are dimensionally consistent? I could post some climate change papers by Neoclassical economists if you like and you can explain how these models work.
I noticed the nonsense you posted on climate change and the energy transition, and just to reinforce Phil's point, you simply don't understand useful energy, useful exergy or path dependence. Your post was bunk.
I am part of several discussion groups including at INET, IIPP and LML, we hold public discussions from time to time so if you think we are wrong, you are more than welcome to present your knowledge at one of these events. |
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Reply | Trump admitting his business pals made billions over the last few days
at 13:04 11 Apr 2025
Yeah, just parroting the mad ramblings of some mainstream economist on X.
I think my favourite of all time on here was a chap who compared economists to those who work in medicine. If medical professionals applied dimensional analysis the same way economists do, then we would have a lot of dead people. |
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Reply | What I can't figure out is....
at 09:56 20 Mar 2025
This is complete drivel.
"He’s already portrayed as dishonest by the media so he might as well go for it. Hmmm, climate scientists are portrayed as alarmist and mad, bad and dangerous to know, does it mean we are wrong?
I have no idea what qualifications you have or what you do, but clearly you spend little time understanding what post-Keynesian economists like Richard Murphy are even proposing. Your "not all borrowing is equal" nonsense shows you have no understanding of the post-Keynesian position and are critiquing from a place of total ignorance. Really had enough of amateurs having a casual pop at things they can't even be bother to learn about.
I love the fact you talk about projections, our projections in physics about the climate using relatively simple models have proven to be correct (these are from the 1980's), economists can't project into next week - I think it was you that posted a projection by Fitch who's projection turned out to be an order of magnitude wrong on the US economy under Biden. Would be interesting to here your thoughts on climate change, are the Neoclassical economists right? Will we see growth long into the future with only a tiny reduction in the growth rate after all the tipping points have been breached? This is all derived using the same illogical assumptions Fitch use in their projections.
The borrowing stuff is standard Neoclassical drivel taught to poor unsuspecting students, a complete fiction of banks, money and debt. Government 'borrowing' creates money on the interest paid as does its' spending and commercial banks issuing loans. Even Elon Musk has worked that much out. Government bonds are integral to the financial system and you seem to be putting this "government bad, markets good" nonsense on every post. I have been working with a group of actuaries and some people in the wider financial community on the impacts of climate change, they are very clear to me that they want their investments protected with flood defences, wildfire warning systems. It isn't going to generate much growth, but the downsides are existential for these firms. By your logic cutting NOAA is a excellent idea as it creates very little growth, your understanding of investors is derived from a textbook, not real life.
The reasoning that yields changed solely because of Rachel Reeves' spending plans is just ludicrous, as somebody with twenty plus years of working on dynamical systems you will have to come up with something better than "faith". |
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Reply | Banks were too big to fail but we're not...no QE or bailouts for us.
at 09:26 18 Mar 2025
I'm guessing you are referring to some sort of debt jubilee to reduce the amount of private debt accrued by those on lower incomes. It would certainly help, but we are in the land of Neoclassical economics, where as Reeves states, nobody thinks government debt is fine. The problem with her argument is that one of the people she talked to about economics, Mariana Mazzucato completely disagrees with her, in fact, a entire economic school of thought disagrees with her. The post-Keynesian school rejects the entire premise as the Neoclassical nonsense is based on fallacies about money, debt and banks.
Somebody on here posted a link to an article that contained the opinions of several post-Keynesian economists and one poster on here didn't even understand the context of the article and gave the stock Neoclassical answers. People need re-educating about how money, debt and banks actually work and that will take a generation to see any progress. The Neoclassical school has also produced the most illiterate nonsense on climate change I have every read, if you support the nonsense coming out of this school then in my eyes you are supporting straight up climate change denial.
The fallacies of government doesn't have any money of its own; it needs to borrow from us or tax us for money; the idea that banks lend out deposits; the notion that government borrowing crowds out private investment; the nonsense that markets dictate what we can do, will continue to drive these conversations for years to come and the trend of rising inequality, climate and ecological breakdown, crumbling infrastructure, an increasingly vulnerable financial sector and resultant economic crashes will push people further to the right.
I'd never heard of Gary Stevenson until a few people mentioned him on here, having watched a couple of his videos he seems to fall for a few of the Neoclassical fallacies, if you married some of his ideas with the post-Keynesian perspective it could help. The Left in general seem wedded to a wealth tax, but in practical terms this would take years to happen and the spending needs to happen now, not only to address the myriad problems building up in society, but also because projects take time to realise any gains and the government needs gains for the electorate. Labour needed to massively front-load their spending, in reality we have got very little. |
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Reply | Migrant "crime crisis"
at 19:41 12 Mar 2025
The coat of arms is similar to Oriel College, Oxford but none the wiser on who has authored this map. I agree it is curious as I volunteer at a food bank and people often talk about empty social housing units. One chap from Mauritius (been here decades) said his sheltered housing block had twelve units out of seventy empty (some have been empty for over a year).
I completely agree with you regarding the tactics around these debates. At the Global Systems Institute we had a public discussion around climate change and invited people from across the political spectrum (JSO/XR to Reform/Tory/Labour). These debates usually start with people coming out swinging, however, the use of interdisciplinary skilled facilitators can make a real difference to how people engage. TWTD is definitely not the place for these types of debates as all the acrimonious stuff takes over. The actual evidence provided is thin to say the least. |
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Reply | Global sea ice at an all-time minimum
at 12:36 6 Mar 2025
Excellent Stuff.
The Hansen group have put forward their argument on aerosols among other things in this recent paper.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00139157.2025.2434494#d1e1468
Hansen et al. describe an Amoc shutdown as "a point of no return"
If you contrast that with economists who find surface albedo feedbacks and Amoc shutdown would have a positive impact on the global economy. This was a meta-analysis of all the 'research' done by climate economists.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2103081118?url_ver=Z39.88-2003&rfr_id=
"AMOC slowdown benefits Europe, while parts of central Asia see increased climate damages."
"Tipping points reduce global consumption per capita by around 1% upon 3C warming and by around 1.4% upon 6C warming, based on a second-order polynomial fit of the data. In some runs, damages exceed 4%.
Refereed by other economists, they don't want climate scientists to referee their work, can't imagine why, this nonsense gets pick up by people in finance and included in their models. All tipping points at 6C of warming causes 1.4% reduction in consumption from what it would have been in the absence of climate change calculated using a smooth function. Total madness.
If people want to learn about tipping points then the Global Tipping Points report is the scientists' evaluation.
https://global-tipping-points.org/resources-gtp/ |
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Reply | Hooray for capitalism!
at 18:15 26 Feb 2025
Props to you for mentioning Kate Raworth, I think her module at Oxford is the only one economics students look forward to taking, she is one of those people that makes learning fun, and is the only one that will teach them anything useful.
I think Lowhouse is a lost cause at this point. I've tried several different ways to explain biophysical limits, but this is a world away from the stylised economic system that is taught on economics courses.
Just reading down the thread you get the sense that people haven't quite got the idea of climate and ecological breakdown, the scale of it, the impacts, what is going to be physically possible. It seems to me people assume you can just select a system: communism, socialism, capitalism, whatever and it will just do its thing.
As you point out, systems with lots of hockey stick graphs tend to be inherently unstable and prone to collapse. A system with 'exponential' traits can simply not survive such a change. The people tasked with understanding capitalism have no idea how it works and can barely describe what it is, that level of ignorance is not a great starting place for a stable world. The idea that capitalism will carry on unabated in our changing environment with a few tweaks is delusional nonsense. As Kevin Anderson (Climate Scientist at Manchester) says, "There are no non-radical futures" Bit of a mentor for us younger "commie climate hoax pushing lefty loons" is Kevin.
In my world the Armed Forces were presented with an analysis of what an shutdown of the Atlantic Sub-Polar Gyre would mean for Britain, actuaries realising just how bad climate change will be for their industry/humanity and we had Ben Franta (Climate Litigation Lab Oxford) give a talk today about how states are now filing lawsuits against fossil fuel interests as capitalism literally eats itself. |
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Reply | Labour isn't working ?
at 11:51 20 Feb 2025
There are two things here; firstly, you are right about Neoclassical economists being consistently wrong about inflation. The reason behind this is because the assumptions in their models are wrong and don't remotely reflect the real world. This makes them beyond useful and they should be discarded. The Bank of England currently has Ben Bernanke (the guy who completely missed the 2008 GFC) conducting a review of its inflation forecasting methodology and it won't improve as a result.
Secondly, as George Box said, "All models are wrong, but some models are useful" and if we use the correct techniques such as we have done with climate models (we have accurately predicted the near linear change in temperature/CO2 concentrations to this point). A colleague of mine who works at the London Mathematical Laboratory wrote a book about the problem of modelling. It is called Escape from Model Land by Erica Thompson and goes into the problems associated with complexity and nonlinear systems. |
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