Behavioral science is real science :) It is absolutely critical to have people like Rory debunking the gospel of economics. Economics is sometimes helpful but it hides behind a cloak of 'rationality', answers that sound good on paper.

Well he certainly seems to have fooled you.

I hear you.

No, Michaux's figures are based on his own estimates for how much storage is needed within a clean energy system, and how much mineral content is going to be needed per unit of energy storage. Those are his estimates, and they are grossly exaggerated, for reasons you would have to ask him about.

I'll bet your "efficient" gas boiler isn't. What is the flow temperature - is it even condensing? And of course it's still burning "natural" gas ie fossil methane, so it's probably the biggest part of you climate footprint (unless you fly a lot and eat stale every day). My suggestion: find a good heating engineer (check with Heatgeek or Warmur) and be ready to switch to electric when that so-called efficient boiler of yours claps out because it's cycling on and off at too high a temperature.

@@MLiebreich I checked. It is an Ideal Logic Boiler and the Central heating is set to 72 degrees. Which I think was set by my builder. It is condensing who moved it recently. And our thermostat is normally set to 16C. But do think my wife boost it a bit before the kids go to bed. And yes we do use it for heating water. And given when don’t eat much meat, and we use a Tern GSD and a non electric tandem for transport etc etc, it could well be the biggest part of our GHG emissions. Points accepted. Absolutely. It will be the last gas boiler we own. And we did remove our gas oven and get an induction hob. Which i’m getting the hang of now. I have no issue with EV cars or Heat pumps. I may end up owning both of these things. My point is that to quote Henry Ford, both of those are a faster horse solution, that accept the existing frame of the problem. Namely transport means moving in a big steal box and thermal comfort means heating a big concrete box. Where as transport can mean Zoom, micro mobility, or PT all planned on a mobile phone (mobile PC). I guess my point is, leaving your ICE car parked on the drive, your gas heating turned off and buying an eScooter and USB powered electrically heated gilet is a perfectly acceptable option. It is also an option that carries far less risk for many people. e.g. don’t let go of the branch you are swinging from until you have a firm grip on the next one.

The key here is "the company handling could not answer some pretty basic questions". Until we have a quorum of suppliers with an acceptable minimum of knowledge and competence, and a will to actually source the latest and best models rather than the junk that has been around for a while, there will continue to be discouraged potential customers. You and your wife did the right thing - at least, you didn't buy anything from a bunch of clowns who don't know what they're talking about. Hopefully your gas boiler will stay up for a couple more years until you can actually find a decent supplier for a heat pump. BTW I am in the same boat.

I find it hard to believe your wife is a sustainability consultant and she doesn't have installers of heat pumps at her fingertips, that she doesn't know the efficiency of heat pumps being 3-600% efficient, nor do I believe an expert would be dissuaded because the installer hadn't lived with the product. Some can be 1000% efficient, your wife being a sustainability consultant would know this. Your wife being the expert would know that for every unit of electrical energy consumed, because of the gas exchange they can produce 3-6 units of cooling or heating energy, she would also know your gas boiler will never reach this efficiency. She might also know heating for homes done by gas has more emissions than all electricity in the UK, so ripping out a boiler would of course be a silly option but adding a heat pump to take over from some of the heating that is 90% efficient is where the difference lies. Electricity being mainly gas fired also has transmission losses though at generation so the 400% efficient metric is then lost but as I say there are heat pumps 1000% efficient, your wife being the consultant would know this and wouldn't this have been the reason why you got installers around?

@@antonyjh1234 TBF heat pumps are not her particular expertise. :-) But yes she is knowledgeable on many topics. And basically we ran the numbers and worked out a heat pump was going to cost us about £30 a year more to run, but this was before the Ukraine war and the current gas prices. We were accepted onto a pilot scheme and could have got the heat pump installed for free I think. But we declined because, of where our utility room was located and uncertainty about where the pipes would run and the noise of the machine would make. It also wasn’t clear, if they would restore the house to its original state, if there was a problem. So in the end it seem like we might end up spending more on building works than the system would cost. But I do expect that our current gas boiler is the last one we will own. But i’m ok with paying for the heat pump and allowing other people to have tested the systems before us :-)

I agree. Smashing bottles at the bottle-bank should not be taken lightly.

​@@MLiebreich Very good !

The battery in an EV is designed to outlast the life of the vehicle in most cases. Early Nissan Leafs with no thermal management might fit your description, but that tech is 13 years old now. Things have moved on substantially.

Roughly a 1000% increase in the amounts of plants globally are needed to reach IIEA predictions by 2030. Uk emits 324 million tonnes and these plants will do roughly 2 million each, predicted. Global emissions are 37 Billion tonnes. Current carbon capture is 0.13% of emissions, if IIEA wild fantasies come true it would be 1.17% of current emissions if they stay at this level, so possibly under 1% if all carbon capture worked in the future so ccs is an absolute waste of time because we haven't factored in the energy to produce the plants. EV uptake should never be allowed to happen, to electrify "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" "The International Energy Agency expects carbon capture to grow substantially over the next few years - potentially to around 435 million tonnes per year globally by 2030, based on announced projects." There should never be full ev uptake, there should never be the goal to replace private vehicles. "To meet the copper needs of electrifying the global vehicle fleet, as many as six new large copper mines must be brought online annually over the next several decades"" "The study found that renewable energy’s copper needs would outstrip what copper mines can produce at the current rate. Between 2018 and 2050, the world will need to mine 115% more copper than has been mined in all of human history up until 2018 just to meet current copper needs without considering the green energy transition."

Yes copper is a crucial component of electrification with, for example, the average wind turbine requiring 9 tons of copper. Simon Michaux has done the math, more extensively than most commentators, on the mining & processing of mineral/ore resources to meet NetZero requirements. He concludes from a mining perspective that NetZero is physically impossible to achieve. So, until someone else comes up with a different verifiable analysis, then his detailed conclusions appear to be the most robust.

@@antonyjh1234 mining recyclable copper makes a lot more sense than mining / extracting millions of barrels of oil every day and then burning them, then doing exactly the same the next day. Running an economy that way which destroys our own habitat is clearly insane.

@@ianlighting100 We don't get copper without oil, we don't have asphalt without oil, rubber coated wires, plastic in EV's where half the car is plastic, without oil. If we want any plastic that comes from the same barrel we refined diesel from, petrol and propane from we are still going to have to use the 100 million barrels we do each day, 15% of each barrel is where we get plastic, pray tell what we will do with 85 million barrels a day after it has been pumped out of the ground, 15% of the energy i used to refine it, so where will these 85 million a day go until we have fully changed over. I think the concept of having the power off 4-500 horses under the hood to go for a sunday drive when a walk might be better is where the insanity might lie, we are trying to replicate a system that should never have happened and are in denial by thinking it can be replaced when change and possible back to horses is more likely on the cards.

Thanks!!!

It's 17% of final energy, but about 25% of energy services (final energy is the fuel you put in your car or the electricity you put in your heat pump, but not the motive power or heat you actually use). And don't mention exergy :-) The reason electricity b is so important if that it will need to cover over 80% of energy services in any net zero energy system of the future.

@@MLiebreich Electricity was 15.68% of total energy in the UK i think the last time I looked, not sure what you mean by 25% of energy services. Not sure what you second paragraph is to mean?

Yep, plenty of those, check Mazda MX30 or Mini electric

Indeed. One of the hardest things about these conversations is knowing when to jump on comments that are obviously wrong and when to let it go. I am constantly having to make judgement calls on the fly. Very occasionally (Marco Alverá, Yorgo Chatzimarkakis, Yanis Varoufakis) I have had to do a post-episode write-up because so much stuff was said that just shouldn't go unchallenged. Nothing in this episode was nearly as bad, IMHO.

I thought the same thing at that remark. Let's face it, if you had solar & battery on the roof then you might never need to go to the Petrol station ever again. Some new cheaper range EV's this year (Dacia Spring, Citroen e-C3). I wondered if he was talking about himself and creating a ready made excuse!!

Compared to an ice car that will last your lifetime producing a new vehicle does not make any sense, being the Uk where there is public transport...I would say he is entirely correct. If we were to electrify the grid for renewables if would mean 6 new copper mines opened per year for the next 3 decades. Compared to what is what you are leaving out, a brand new vehicle that in 30 years would have travelled less than 50,000 k, how is the production value of any new vehicle and better option than a second hand one? Buying solar to then buy a battery along with inverters etc the total cost and energy would be more than what 3 litres a week would cost in emissions. He is absolutely correct in my opinion.

@@antonyjh1234 well to be able to buy a second hand car, someone has to have bought a new one... Which is why the zero emissions mandate on new vehicles makes total sense, because by the time this comes into force emissions from battery production will have fallen massively, because renewable energy is so much cheaper than fossil. And the mandate is unfortunately needed, because automakers did not want to invest in EV, while they could still sell ICE cars. And no brilliant persuasion would have changed that...

How come there are loads of other espresso machines available in the EU at higher wattages?

There are some very robust Life Cycle Assessments for meat that take into account all the emissions througout the value chain, and you can compare it with getting the same nutrients directly from other meats and non-meat diets. They are unequivocal - eating farmed meat is bad for the climate and bad for land use. However, what they can't cover is the complexity of land use, in particular for extensive meat farming, where the animals are performing multiple functions in the eco-system and society, so loading their entire carbon footprint onto the food output is inappropriate.

@@MLiebreich And this is the problem, the issue is not to replace the food, it is to replace the whole animal and all their products. In no way is it about trying to replace food calories of meat and say case closed. We currently feed more crop waste to animals than food we grow for them, going crop based directly subsidises caged animals the most, I don't eat caged but under no circumstances can you say all eggs, feather meal, meat can be more polluting if everything needs a grown replacement. The 14% of ALL animals diet if in USA is corn, that is one crop and they take a third of that, 350 million ton is grown and I think 5.9 Billion ton of crops is grown for humans, caged animals take 15% of corn and beef dairy the other 15%, roughly, all seed oils have waste and this goes to caged. I eat grass fed beef from non arable land, that we do not irrigate, fertilise or plough, anything to replace this is going to need a polluting grown replacement and with a basically carnivore diet now after being v many years ago, I eat less kg's overall. The life cycle of transport trucks plus tractors should have been used in all studies previous to a few years ago, not just fuel used. The current overconsumption levels of meat is a direct result of so much crop waste, if this was composted, it would still emit to the atmosphere, crop based that depends on oil is not the way forward.

@@MLiebreich "Bad for land use" is a moot point if other animals like deer take a cows place, the area of land that we don't do anything to and get a return from means something to consumption of sprays and fertilisers. Guy Mcpherson said on one of his videos if cattle numbers haven't increased in I think he said 80 years, let's use 100, if the herd size, like in a lot of western countries, has not increased and methane from cattle is gone after 100 years then no further warming has occurred from cattle. No raising of the amount so if cattle raised it 0.6c and no increase in numbers and the methane is gone after 100 years then they are carbon neutral. No point saying cows have 86 times over 30 years or 28 times over 100 if we don't extrapolate that to 200 years etc Crops versus meat are measured on a per kg basis, of only crops that make it to market, per kg, not nutrition, are measured per kg of meat or dairy etc as I say with all the emissions pushed onto the edible. To replace all the inedible is what the metric should be. If you used toilet paper collagen held it together, if you have water or sugar filtered, activated carbon, bones, did that, if you are using plastic like in the device I'm using, fat went into it, same as asphalt, pet food in the hundreds of thousands of tons along with wool and leather, all needing grown replacements. Saying that the emissions of bones and the water usage etc should be put onto the meat and then compared per kg only against crops that make it to market seems a poor way of measuring things to me. A full life cycle of meat under these circumstances means nothing. I f cattle are carbon neutral and CO2 is going to be in the atmosphere 10,000 years and all crops need trucks, tractors, synthetic fertilisers and eating the recommended amount of meat being around 12=15 cows over a 60 year span, how would 60 years of crop replacement of even the meat be better environmentally? It won't, there is nothing cleaner for the land than basically the same as wild animals and we have been lied to by food companies to sell product. It's like the soy lie, where animals eat the majority of soy, humans eat 6% whole bean, animals 7%, the rest is processed into oil which is why it's in everything, animals tale around 1% of this and humans the rest, humans take 92% of the human usable part of soy, animals take 99% of the waste, like all seed oils there is seed cake, humans don't eat it, by final weight animals take the majority, of stuff we can't eat, 86% of what animals eat is indigestible by humans, using a total tonnage of what animals eat is a misleading metric.

If we used green ammonia for fertilizer and fuel for tractors, dryers, etc. then can we eat all the meat we want? We constantly co-mingle 'conservation' with 'ghg'. There is nearly infinite green energy, if we harness this properly there is zero need to be frugal. If your jet travel runs on green fuel travel as much as you want, no harm done.

@@Greenammonianews Tractors have not much to do with cows or sheep really, tractors are usually used for crops. Nothing of your words about green travel etc can happen without rubber coated wires, mining, tryes, all oil based. There is no green fuel that wouldn't have production emissions, it would still need to have a grown substrate like bio diesel. Bio diesle is made using synthetic fertiliser from oil, harvested with oil based and fossil fule produced. If talking USA all agriculture is 10% of emissions, all animals half that and beef and lamb 65% of that so around 3.25% of emissions, considering meat is around half that all this talk around cows killing the planet is around 1.6% of emissions for the edible. All the dairy, eggs, wool, leather, meat etc has to be able to be replaced and lower 3.25% of emissions, while we ignore using a tank of diesel that has the same amount of energy as 3 months of my total electrical energy with the air con going 24-7 over summer. The misdirection of food instead of just everyday driving is where the conversation should always have been around.

but we in germany are getting this oil in wesseling in our refineries🤷‍♂️🙋‍♂️

The SMUG is coming!! Cfr South park

Before it was just other people who thought that of you but now you know it for yourself, the only way is up.

@@antonyjh1234 No. This kind of boomer nonsense has been debunked so many times... why don't you people stick to anti vaccer tinfoil stuff? I was a big fan, and hoped natural selection would solve our political problems. If you ever bothered to google things before commenting you would have learned that a typical gas boiler emits around 2,500 kg of CO2 per year, while a heat pump emits around 850 kg.

Rory swears a bit. We are a family show!

@@MLiebreich Thank you for your open critique of Micheaux and Lomborg. Can you find a guest who can thoroughly and resoundingly debunk their icky schtick? Auke Hoekstra is good and would do again in a pinch; it's four years since you had him on last, according to KZbin. Someone with the same cred and background but a more accessible accent might rock even more, but, Micheaux sure been doing the rounds over the last few years. It'd be grand to get the ball rolling back down the hill towards him!

@@MLiebreich Might as well do episodes with both Lomborg and Simon. Any plan ?

Yes please! But he wants £30m to do it