First the War Against the Motorist, Now the War Against the Homeowner...

 Just as there is now a war between the establishment and the motorist, there is soon to be a war between the establishment and the homeowner. 

The latest net zero laws being proposed aim to make it a criminal offence if you don't comply with net zero regulations regarding your home, or make an incorrect or inaccurate statement on any compliance documentation.

The war against the car has been going on for over a decade now and it's never more clear than the proposals around ULEZ, the utter failure of the London ULEZ to make the air around London any clearer and the ever increasing taxation of the car, especially cars deemed "unnecessary" by the people that see themselves as our overlords. They have made it more difficult to own a car and will continue to make it more difficult until the majority of us give up and settle in our 15 minute cities.

Now the establishment are coming for your house. During the Blair years we had the decree that only condensing boilers could be installed. There was no opposition. Then they said that we will only be allowed to install heat pumps instead of gas boilers. Despite the majority of UK housing stock not being compatible with heat pumps, they are making it law.

Now we have the Net Zero legislation being proposed to make criminals out of homeowners that cannot afford to make the required changes to their home.

In other words, they are making it more difficult to own a house, such that eventually you'll give it up.

I'm sure the government will have something akin to the Car Scrappage Scheme where they take ownership of your home. and then rent it out. Not necessarily to you of course, because you couldn't afford to comply you'll be deemed not worthy of house occupation. A retired couple? Nah, off to the government-owned home for you. I say "home": what I mean is "processing facility" where all the old, useless unproductive people go to be "reclaimed". In other words killed and made into compost. 

And you thought raising the pension age was a stand-alone thing? Don't be stupid.

Produce & consume, or else. Serve your corporate masters, consume their output. Accept the credits they give you that allow you to consume, but don't ever think of saving those credits to be able to better your position. Those credits are calculated by A.I. in order to keep you nourished just well enough to serve in the factory. If you do not use your allowance you will be malnourished and will be deemed unproductive and sent off for reclamation.

If you think this is a bit far fetched, I'm only joining the dots and seeing the trend that has been in place for over two decades.

Remember the WEF statement "You Will Own Nothing and Be Happy"? Well, the first part of that is in play. They are making it so difficult to own a car, travel and now own a home, you'll be begging the government to take them off your hands. 

Vote for Labour, or Conservatives or Liberal Democrats at the next election and you'll get more of the same. Another 5 years of oppressive diktats from  whichever government gets in power.

UNLESS YOU VOTE FOR SOMEONE ELSE!

The EV Charging Dance.

 I've just recently purchased (with the help of family) a plug-in Hybrid Prius. Lets not dwell on the lacklustre performance, only to say it's ideally suited to snotting round town picking up fares and will not win any prizes as a grand tourer. 

The other week I went from Leek to Buxton and the car almost ground to a halt on the hills. It is not performance-oriented.

Anyway, lets get to the title. 

Being a plug-in EV, the car obviously can run on Petrol or can be charged up and run for a short time in EV-mode just off the battery.

The battery needs to be charged up (obviously), but having no facilities to charge at home, I'm now becoming an expert on the public EV charging network.

In a nutshell, it sucks. 

The reasons are many, but the one big factor is the lack of consistency. You have a variety of charging sockets as well as a number of different applications to enable a charge at said socket. 

So, first hardware: first you have to know if your car will charge using AC or DC. Then you can move on to the various sockets, charging rates and enabling applications.

Lets just say, you have a number of different connectors for both AC and DC, you then have a number of different suppliers installing charging machines with different interfaces on the machines and different enabling applications. If it sounds complicated, then it is.

If you have a basic smartphone with not a lot of memory, you'll be filling that memory mostly with charging applications.

The uncertainty of compatibility between the charger and the car and the requirement to have internet access ends up in the Owner doing the EV Charging Dance, where the owner goes to the charger, does something, then plugs into the car, then returns to the charger, then logs onto the app to enable charging, then looks at the charger, then goes to the window of the car and peers through the window to see if the dashboard indicates a charge, then back to the charger, then back to the car several times until at some random point both the car and the charger agree that electrons are moving down the cable in sufficient quantity to enable a charge. 

Then the owner can waste a half hour at the nearby Starbucks. Actually the Greggs mega charge site near Salford Quays looks like a bloody good idea, at least you can eat yourself into a food coma while you wait. 

Finally, my favourite charging supplier at the moment is PodPoint. Their 7KW charging posts at Supermarkets just work. The posts start charging immediately and the app gives you 15 minutes to verify the charge. It just works. No EV charging Dance for me. EV owners with bigger batteries tend to shun the smaller charge posts, so I can normally get a slot and charge.

Net Zero: How Do You Measure Success?

Okay I have a couple of questions about Net Zero. 

The First is: How Do You Measure Success? Because if we are spending Billions of pounds on trying to attain Net Zero, there should be some tangible benefit, some monitoring, some measurement that proves the success of the plan. 

Otherwise we are just throwing money away.

Without the ability to monitor the effects of our privations, there's no point. If we go net zero and global CO2 keeps climbing then there's no point.

Virtue or salving the conscience of a minority is not a good enough. We need tangible results. 

Just saying but doing X we save Y amount of carbon is not good enough. I want to see monitoring, I want to see live data showing an actual benefit. Because by doing X and reducing carbon output in one area may actually increase carbon in another area.

For instance shutting down steel production here may reduce local carbon, but overall may increase it.

For instance steel production, which has now virtually ceased in the UK. It reduces carbon output locally, but now you are relying on third-world countries producing steel using inefficient technology, creating more CO2 to produce the steel. The steel then needs to be shipped to the UK, so unless you're using sailing ships, that actually adds to the carbon footprint of that steel.

It's like electric cars. They are only zero-emissions vehicles locally. The energy used to create the electricity still creates CO2 at the power station. It's just that the CO2 isn't produced by the vehicle.

That's a con. It's not reducing CO2, it's just moving production elsewhere.

If we were measuring the actual production of CO2 regarding the things we have done to reduce local CO2, the overall CO2 output would have risen. Because we are not making goods locally, we are making them half way round the world and shipping them to the UK. 

We are not burning the fuel directly in an internal combustion engine, we are instead burning fossil fuel in a power station to heat water to create steam which turns a turbine which turns a generator which produced electricity which is fed down wires at ultra high voltages and then stepped down through several transformers to mains voltage and then through a charger into the battery of the electric vehicle. At each step there are losses because no transfer or conversion of one type of energy to another is 100% efficient.  It's therefore not the most efficient use of the fossil fuel compared to burning it directly.

The people falling for all of this are really falling for marketing. Maybe extreme marketing, but marketing all the same. It's not science, otherwise we would be doing net zero a lot differently.

And we would be monitoring the results. Scientifically.