Thought Experiment

What a ridiculous phrase that title is. Why not just call it a discussion, a debate, an examination of, exploration of… or just a good chat about something? Giving it the dignity of that stylised monicker seeks to elevate anybody’s random question into some sort of enlightened scientific enquiry. Anyway, last night Gaia Vince, on BBC’s Inside Science, chaired such a so-called experiment on the possibility of abundant cheap energy, with various contributors coming up with Utopian visions of pastoral bliss, free from toil, and oil.

It is almost as if the people consulted about such matters have little grasp of human nature, a failing which seems to affect most policy makers across all aspects of governance. Not only is cheap and abundant energy – for the whole world, by the way - a highly unrealistic scenario, they seem to forget how the human economy apportions resources. And how the human masses react to the meagre shares they are awarded. There are non so equal as those who control the means of production and distribution.

It was quite good timing though, just after Grants Shapps’ appointment as Minister for Energy Security and Net-Zero. And what a title that is! A bit like having a Minister of War AND Peace… or, indeed, the Ministry of Truth. Energy Security AND Net-Zero? We could have energy security almost immediately if we abandoned Net-Loser today and got on with oil and gas while building plenty of nuclear capacity. Sure, keep the windfarms, at least until the maintenance cost renders them uneconomic. If we get nuclearising right now, we should have stations on-stream before the windies collapse… around 2050 I reckon.

It strikes me that we can have either, but not both. But even if we all got behind the green catastrophe it is doubtful that baleful Britain has the ability to deliver. It should be clear by now that we are hopeless at infrastructure. The Victorian legacy systems are straining at the seams and we have done precious little to prepare for the serial failures we now see on a regular basis. 

Water, sewage, rail… all in tatters. Our roads are fucked and as for HS2, it is clear that while a small number of consultants will make fortunes from the white elephant, the project will never be completed, much as the M25 (proposed in 1944, given the go-ahead in 1975) which is still not finished and costs £billions in maintenance and disruption. The latest, HS2 Plan B, should be called HS2B or not 2B.

The engineers and inventors and pioneers of our past must look down from their celestial rest in despair. They must wonder how we can have so many people sitting idle, or else doing nothing productive, while a diminishing work force is taxed to the hilt to pay for it all, yet nobody dares propose the simple solution of getting everybody back to the real grind of building a society and an infrastructure fit for the future. And there is no sign of anything getting better.

So here’s a little question for you all: do you think we will ever achieve either energy security or net-zero, or will we simply fail at both? Answers in a thought experiment.

Batteries not Included

I am a sceptic, it’s true. I’m not convinced, and there are many things I’m not convinced about. I’m not convinced High Speed 2 is a great idea. I’m not convinced that carbon dioxide is the planet killer it is claimed to be. I’m not convinced of the supposed neutrality of the judiciary. I am really not convinced one little bit that islam is the religion of peace. The fad of the day, gender fluidity, it seems to me, is an unconvincing mask for simple juvenile unhappiness and I remain to be convinced that actual equality is even a thing to strive for, let alone achieve in the main. I have a sinking feeling that in a world where all is equal then nothing is exceptional, exciting, or a reason to keep on getting up in the morning.

Oh yes, I’m a bit of a pessimist too. I am not saying that any of the aforementioned things are false, nor am I stating that belief in them is necessarily wrong, I am simply, as defined, a sceptic: a person inclined to question or doubt accepted opinions. But it’s not just opinions; supposed facts often turn out to be untrue, statistics are tortured into admission and the human mind has a seemingly infinite capacity for conflation, preferring the cunning conspiracy to the pragmatic reality that somebody, somewhere just got something wrong.

Scepticism is the primary tool of the scientist, or it should be, and in the search for greater knowledge we must never assume that all evidence is admissible. So excuse me, please, if I am les than welcoming of the current government’s alarming raft of revelations ahead of the budget. Maybe it is my pessimistic nature, forged in the furnace of Great British failures of the past, but it all feels a bit too much, a bit too far and a bit too soon. To me, the goal of #netzero is fallacious and unachievable. I don't believe for one second the much-vaunted diversity of the consultation process includes the voices of informed dissenters from the climate gospel orthodoxy.

Maybe this is just my pessimistic side gaining the upper hand but for every report I read of the miraculous advance of battery technology, there is one warning of the dire consequences of manufacturing expensive, difficult-to-dispose-of, potentially toxic devices. For every study hailing the amazing advance in renewable energy generation, there is a counter argument focusing on the unreliability of such technology. Go nuclear! But, oh, nuclear; isn’t that associated with death and destruction?

The thing is, I don’t know the answer and neither do you. And neither do those who are advising the people who make the decisions; the people who spend our money. Because it is all about the future, it is all unknowable and even after the fact, there will be disagreement about whether what we did was good, bad, or terrible. (And it will certainly have been racist; you can bet your life on that.)

Here we go - all or nothing...

So, where does that leave us? It is often said that it is better to make a decision and live with its downsides than not to make a decision at all and be entirely at the mercy of fate. Given that nobody knows where Boris’s vision will take us and we have no means of stopping this speeding train, we have just two positions to take. Stand on the tracks in a vain attempt to derail it, with a certainty of outcome that would be somewhat sub-optimal. Or grab a flag and cheerily wave to passers-by. I’m still a sceptic, very much so, but for the moment I’m going to get on board and see where it takes us.

On Track

Some stuff has been agreed about HS2, but unless you are directly affected you won’t really care. Obviously if you have recently bought a new house in Sheffield, or you have spent forty-plus years farming a certain acreage of land, the effects of the declared route will be potentially devastating but hey, people survive earthquakes, floods, overwhelming forest fires and so on, so you are expected to take it on the chin, relocate and carry on.

But apart from the relatively few, sitting where the tracks may one day be, the only cost is the headline capital expenditure. Of course the projected £55billion might be better spent elsewhere; it could pay off the laughable Brexit ‘divorce bill’, or it could quiet the public service unions for a couple of weeks, or it could even help to mollify Nicola Spudgun’s incessant whining, although that is entirely debateable; she seems to exist to complain.

But of course it won’t be; that is the project won’t, as it were, be derailed over current spending concerns because this is ‘investment’ and therefore good spending. At least it is touted that way. It will bring inestimable benefits, they say. But to whom? Yes, there will be employment, but how much of that will go to foreign contractors, or taken on by migrant workers? How much of the huge sum of wages will find itself not invested locally but sent abroad?

It is scarcely creditable that a golden opportunity to train up our own will be missed – over the course of the project a whole generation of new civil engineers, project managers, construction workers and on and on, could be built up – but missed it will be. Too hard, they will say, to try and convert the recalcitrant, idle British from welfare to work. Too easy, they will discover, to go for the short-term cheaper option. And this is the great tragedy of the British state.

Is it a lack of confidence in our own? Is it kow-towing to Brussels and free movement? Is it, genuinely, a bizarre commitment to diversity at any cost? This apparent abandonment of all the things we used to be good at is part of the despair that my generation feels when they look at how our country is turning out. And in part it might explain some of the attraction of Jeremy Corbyn, who talks the talk of Britishness while at the same time condoning an economic ideology that would prove ruinous.

The tangible direct benefits of a finished HS2 are nebulous. In the decades it will take to complete, the aims set out some decades ago will be half a century out of date by the time they come to fruition. Nobody with any experience of human caprice claims that degree of prescience. But the potential benefits of putting the British first during the period of investment will be lost in our inability to discriminate in their favour. If we don’t start to right the wrongs of the last twenty years, very soon there will be no point.

HS2 - what it definitely WON'T look like

That £55billion (but of course it will really be many times that amount) could go to buy 350 of the new £150million-a-pop fighters, or half that number and the platforms to carry them. Or it could be used to build hospitals, schools, or reintroduce actual policing. It could even be put towards reversing the sudden declining life expectancy... or curing cancer. But it won’t be, will it? Like every other national ‘investment’ opportunity, it will be misspent, misappropriated and basically pissed up the wall until the day they abandon it, unfinished, five times over budget and twenty years too late.