One of the biggest problems in British politics is that we have a bunch of towns that had an economic purpose when we had heavy industry and are now simply places to live, and no politician is willing to tell people we should probably just abandon their town.

Ofgem engages in some deckchair shuffling as bills continue to be too high. Standing charges are the most efficient and fairest way to recover the fixed costs of the energy system. You don't use fewer pylons if you use less power. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

statistic of the day

This is such a good paper.

There should be a high bar for politicians attacking the media, but maybe Ed Davey has half a point here? For example, the first three paragraphs of this BBC story repeat Reform's £243bn figure without saying that the thinktank behind the estimate now disowns it. (This is mentioned in paragraph 35)

It just straightforwardly *insane* how much political chatter in the United Kingdom is about the next general election, an event that is a long way in the future, and how basically none of it is about 'uh, this policy agenda doesn't look adequate to the scale of the inherited problem'.

Farage is Britain's answer to Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab.

I think the media, which remains populated by people who went to private school and don't actually know any normal people, assume the public is fundamentally bestiary and driven by base hatred which it assumes are in some way 'authentic' and therefore unchallengeable.

I genuinely wonder whether we should treat dopamine feeds like tiktok much as we do other drugs: accessed under licence and in known quantities. We should certainly prevent under 18s from accessing it.

For my money, this is one of the most important stories of the year. FLF are one of my clients, but I'm happy to put my voice behind this proposition, which looks like it has cracked fusion. /1 www.energyvoice.com/renewables-e...

I am really excited to announce the call for the PhD Course in Energy Humanities! Held at the @greenhouseuis.net from 1-5 December. Applications are welcome until 24 October. #envhum #envhist #energyhistory

If you see this, quote the energy you bring to Bluesky

imagine getting qt dunked by ed davey. unrecoverable. you’re furious and he is serenely going down a log flume in bognor regis.

Given the context and the crowd, despite Musk’s weasel words, this was a call for violence against the British state, from a foreign national who controls a major propaganda engine, and has engineered it to monetise hate

If I were the UK Government, I would simply not continue to humilitate myself by posting on a website owned by someone who wants my overthrow.

First Past the Post cannot handle this level of fragmentation. It will produce completely freak results. We can grasp this problem now, or wait for the train to crash.

As someone who used to work in the awful concrete architecture of 1 Victoria Street, I endorse this message.

Say what you will about the Tube strikes, but I've been able to have a lovely stroll through bits of central London I've never been to before and try nice new coffee shops.

If I wanted to go on to sabotage Langeled, I would try to justify it in advance. Although lol at the idea that the UK would be decisive enough to use the SBS in this manner. www.the-express.com/news/world-n...

It is incredibly galling - or at least should be - for fans of democracy to realise that China is far better at tackling this kind of long-term problem than any Western nation. It's this, rather than the nonsense of Reform or even Trump, that poses the genuine existential threat to liberalism.

Any politician who uses the trope of "why should we decarbonise if China continues to build coal?" should be shot into the sun. Any politician who can't see that China is shaping up to dominate the energy transition should be sent to a re-education camp*. www.theguardian.com/environment/...

About 5% of my personal AI productivity gain is lost to inwardly recoiling whenever ChatGPT describes whatever inane thing I've asked as a, "Great question!" I would far prefer an AI that actively resents being asked stupid things. www.theregister.com/2025/09/04/m...

I can’t claim to fully understand every nuance and detail, but this by @adambell.bsky.social is insanely interesting reading. unbalancingmechanism.substack.com/p/the-ghost-...

I am in favour of LVT primarily on economic grounds but also, in a very minor way, as a route to cutting off the incomes of idiot scions and enabling social mobility in reverse.

Trump should've renamed the DoD to the Department of Fights.

This attitude and this chart is why Reform is gaining. I genuinely can't blame the vast bulk of the population who have seen basically no improvements in their living standard for twenty years for wanting radical change. They might want the wrong change, but that is the fault of the centre too.

I am hardly a natural Rayner cheerleader, but genuinely furious that she's gone. Laurie Magnus's verdict confirms she acted on advice, she just missed the disclaimer saying she should get extra advice. Not just an honest mistake - a mistake literally anyone could make. There but for the grace etc...

NEW POST: THE GHOST AT THE FEAST. The power market is dead, replaced by central planning. But as I set out here, it will rise again - in ways we haven't seen since the early 1900s... open.substack.com/pub/unbalanc...

sam altman is trying to find the guy who did this

New @greenpeaceuk.bsky.social @adambell.bsky.social research finds removing gas plants from the market could reduce household energy bills £1.7bn/ year, & by £3.3bn for businesses. Crazy as Poland & Germany look to massively increase dependence on gas power.. www.theguardian.com/business/202...

Top WickedProblems.earth guest @adambell.bsky.social et al have a pragmatic, realistic, + cost-saving, plan of unrigging UK electricity markets - phasing out gas. While saving £5 billion. And they have the receipts, in this report for @greenpeaceuk.bsky.social. NB, @zackpolanski.bsky.social

Really interesting proposal from @dougparr.bsky.social, @adambell.bsky.social, et al for how the government could ringfence gas power stations and cut domestic energy bills in the process. www.businessgreen.com/news/4518483...

Honestly a better argument to get people off their phones than most of the scolding you see on substack

It was fantastic to work with Doug and Greenpeace colleagues on this. For my money, this is the most immediate step the Government could take to reduce costs on bills.

I could almost like this chap if he didn't want to leave NATO. I can't find anything he's publicly said on Ukraine, which makes me suspicious.

There is indeed a baffling assumption at the core of our politics that hatred is authentic but love is not.

I do wonder what it will take for European politicians to actually start massing troops on the Ukrainian border. What would they have done if Von Der Leyen's plane had crashed?

The annoying thing about the PM's flag statement today is that it was so easy to say something substantive. "Of course I like the flag,but I hate litter, and slapping the flag on things that aren't yours is littering."

Thoroughly agree with this. Many personnel changes in Whitehall could be replaced with asking, "What are the difficult choices we are currently avoiding?"

This would be laughable if it wasn't so serious: yet again, the Tories are claiming that we can get "all our oil and gas" from the North Sea and that we should be doing even more to support the industry to extract. There are several reasons why we should treat this with maximum scepticism:

As noted elsewhere in this thread, Isaac from Crystal Clean Windows York Limited came over and cleaned the restaurants windows for free and helped remove the graffiti. That's patriotism! Trying to make your community better. Reaching out and helping others.

As I read it, this is about scrapping rig electrification and removing the ban on flaring of methane. Certainly the former has run into cost challenges, as the CNOOC decision a few days ago indicates. www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

A few thoughts on this, which has been an open secret in the sector for quite a while. It is the Government's growth mission and clean power mission in manifest tension. /1

I recall those marches in the early 2000s against the expansion of the WTO on the grounds that it would hand power to corporations over the State and thus democracy. And now global trade is being gutted and corporations brought to heel, I assume the SWP and their ilk are celebrating.

The energy price cap rise is a near perfect little case study of Labour's wider predicament. Short thread on the government's continued failure to explain/get a hearing for the mess it inherited and how it is trying to fix it. www.businessgreen.com/news/4518148...

NEW Yes, an incoming illiberal and radical UK government would have absolute constitutional power By me Substack: emptycity.substack.com/p/yes-an-inc... Personal blog: davidallengreen.com/2025/08/yes-...

This, but also: 'well it won't work' instantly concedes the moral ground - it's treating 'mass deportation & scrap/ignore any law in the way' like a normal, conventional policy, where the main Q is do the £/logistics stack up' This is not a normal, conventional policy.

It would be messy and chaotic and crazy expensive but ultimately Reform can override courts if they have a majority and I don't see why, say, the Taliban wouldn't sign a returns agreement to get back people they would like to torture and kill. So yes it could work.

One of two very good threads by Adam on this. A startling number of people - responding, in part, by the tone set by their government - just have this very complacent 'oh, no, this plan will never work'. I mean, 1) it could but also 2) they will definitely try.

It's important to assume that Reform in Government would indeed try to do this. The right thing is not to tell the public that this won't happen - so they can therefore vote for Reform without guilt - but rather that a vote for Reform is a vote for the suffering of hundreds of thousands of people.