Today's BlueSky discourse is about why the media aren't arguing for renewables-maxxing BUT ALSO how we should make use of all the parts of a horse. I am never leaving this website.

Households to be rewarded for weekend laundry this summer. “Running your washing machine on a sunny weekend, may help keep the grid stable,” with households able to receive credits or discounts for using excess solar power when demand is low. @adambell.bsky.social @listentotimesradio.bsky.social

I can't stop laughing at this in Spiked from the head of the MCC think tank (the guys who just hosted Matt Goodwin's speech in Hungary to 17 people and one @jonworth.eu, and whose government funding Magyar just eliminated). "Orban lost because the kids went to therapy." Cope and seethe, Boomer.

This is a searing attack - giftarticle.ft.com/giftarticle/... and not just on Labour, it's on everyone. Needs to be taken seriously

Not sure why we have to see pensions and defence as mutually exclusive.

BRITAIN'S HOT ELECTRIC SUMMER We're all going to get paid to turn on our air conditioning this summer, as NESO announces its intent to use its Demand Flexibility Service to pay people when generation exceeds demand. /1 www.telegraph.co.uk/business/202...

This post is just terrible philosophy. When one of the primary points of your opponents is that language itself is inherently suspect and riddled with power structures and context-specific meaning, complaining that their prose repeats the same idea multiple times in different ways is just dumb.

Incredible, "You can't blockade me, I'm blockading you!" energy from the US of A.

The response to three written questions I asked around what assessment the government have made of the proposal in the report by Greenpeace and Stonehaven, Power Shift, published in March, to move gas-fired power stations into a Regulated Asset Base strategic reserve, have been answered.

I have always thought that the logic of avoiding having an entire continent unified under a single military command sitting right next to us would drive us to join any pan-European army.

This is a variety of what Michael Gove was trying to claim in a Spectator article recently. @steverichards.bsky.social did a deconstruction of it. Gove's assertion - that Milliband was really in charge of the govt - was, safe to say, rubbish.

This article is not particularly coherent and seeks to create a dichotomy within the Government that does not in fact exist. Decisions on Rosebank and Jackdaw are quite separate from the broader electrification thrust. www.thetimes.com/article/8616...

If it’s such a ‘gold mine’ why did the 14 year period of the last Conservative government, throughout which it pursued a policy of issuing licenses and maximising oil and gas production, end up being defined by austerity and the worst wage growth since the Napoleonic era?

This is really good. My experience of driving through secondary legislation in government was that the blockers were (a) availability of legal drafting resource and (b) Ministerial bandwidth to sign off minor amends. /1

Wind turbines cannot go (a) where there are lots of people, and (b) where there are very few people. Do I have that right Simon Jenkins. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Israel is a rogue state and is deliberately trying to break the ceasefire and use the opportunity to annex part of Lebanon.

Insofar as they have any real effect (which, if you are reasonably careful and a bit creative, they don’t), they are a bad thing. Pseudo-quantification of the immeasurable and the unknown is pointless and retrograde.

Fascinating to see this in @privateeyenews.bsky.social, clearly prompted by someone in Government briefing against the move to diminish the RPC. Absent alas is any discussion of whether its scrutiny of impact assessments (IAs) has actually benefited the public. /1

One could argue that you could manage the flight of the monied following higher taxes by tying civic benefits to residency.

Around 200 air strikes on central Beirut, significantly beyond the usual areas targeted. Absolutely horrific loss of life and utterly damning of Israel's respect for any effort at peace.

Art of the Deal, latest update

Iran's strategic victory couldn't happen to a worse regime. It shores up the IRGC just when the population was turning against it. A more capable American regime may have been able to leverage this moment, but the US has run through its munitions a year before China will be ready to attack Taiwan.

WHAT IS THE DEAL?? WHAT WOULD THE DEAL BE?? I feel like I'm going insane every time I read one of these. WHY WOULD IRAN MAKE A DEAL WITH THE GUYS WHO MURDERED THE LAST PEOPLE WHO NEGOTIATED WITH THEM???

I have a father and mother in law in Iran. I have a sister in law. A niece. She's 14. She likes silly pink headbands and purses and dresses, just like kids her age all over the world. There are 93 million people like her in Iran. People who do all the normal mundane life things as the rest of us.

Delighted that there is going to be a consultation on sorting out firework nuisance - at last! This is long overdue

Armageddon is terrible, but our only other option was diversity trainings at work.

I've been following this debate for the past few days. I think there is a conflation of two things: a) that the very rich have disproportionate influence, and b) that the solution to a lack of public funds is to tax them. /1

Cummings has become an absolute parody of himself, unable to reflect on his own mistakes. This is a long way from Boyd and his other intellectual heroes.

This is a good piece. We simply accept 1000s of unnecessary deaths because we won't force all of us who drive to accept we have a dangerous machine in our hands. And then fail to enforce that fact as police have basically stopped policing the roads. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

I am increasingly of the view that the arcane procedures of Parliament are just getting in the way of getting stuff done. What is first reading actual for? Why do we need to split votes on principle and detail, when the reality is second reading will just be whipped through?

No rush!

This is very obviously true. Much like a nuclear deterrent, if you don't have indigenous oil and gas you're at the mercy of those who do while your energy system is hooked on it. China is now selling security in the form of electric goods. I just wish it wasn't also selling authoritarianism.

And the South West lets us down again. From what I understand, weaker links across the B10 network boundary, which covers most of the south without London and Kent, means that in the absence of large transmission generation NESO worries about voltage control on the circuits beyond the boundary. /1

All eyes now turn to the South West, where weaker grid links with the rest of the country mean that we need quite a lot of solar and wind output to fully displace gas...

Meanwhile, slightly bizarrely, if you have an electric car and charge it on Octopus Agile tomorrow lunchtime, you'll be paid several quid to do so because there's going to be TOO MUCH WIND POWER FOR THE GRID TO HANDLE. Time to open the oven door, turn the heat to max, and reduce your energy bill!

This is the right answer, but the reason it won't happen is because cash transfers will contribute to inflation and about a quarter of our debt is index-linked.

"Among young American men, the strongest predictor of support for the tradwife lifestyle was not gallantry but hostility towards women" Apparently this is not what researchers "expected". Which makes one wonder: had these researchers thought about it for 30 seconds? www.thetimes.com/life-style/s...

The Moonites are already gathering on the shores of the Sea of Tranquility and demanding that Earth stop sending illegal immigrants in small rockets across the Cislunar Channel.

Rail fares yes, but cutting fuel duty simply creates additional revenue for fuel suppliers once prices rise to match the new equilibrium. If you want to lower prices, lower speed limits for ICE vehicles. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

2015 - endless newspaper articles warning of UK blackouts due to 'unreliable' renewables 2025 - 50% of electricity from renewables for second year in a row no blackouts no blockades on sun or wind in Straits of Hormuz www.gov.uk/government/s...

Ok, this is absolutely sending me 😂😂😂 Astronauts with #relatablecontent

False information includes public statements by their CEO, one can only presume.

Then vs now. Such a shame.

Slightly more seriously than my previous post, freedom of navigation of the seas underpinned by the hard power of the dominant naval hegemon has been the foundation of the global economy for the last two centuries.

Is... is this a demand that Britain Rule The Waves? Last time we did that we saw our role much more as interdicting a particular type of trade going to the Americas...

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Great example of actually good policy communication from my town council about the vexing issue of parking, clearly in response to the number of requests for a CPZ they get.

www.ft.com/content/4f09... Genuinely hard to overstate how much of a strategic defeat it would be for the United States if the war ends with effective Iranian control of the Strait.

Yes2AV was my formative political experience. I ran the Islington campaign for yes, and I attribute our local success to (a) lots of doorknocking and (b) handing out leaflets saying that the BNP was in favour of No.

As an NCO in the Net Zero brigade, I can confirm that I do not want rampant inflation and considerable suffering.