It’s always touching to listen to the philosophical musings of our old friend Dave Watford and the lads at the Dog and Duck. Last night they favoured us with their thoughts(is that the right word?-ed) on the current Energy crisis:
“ Iss Bonkers! Why don’t we jus drill fer all that oil inna (expletive deleted) norwf sea, an forget orl this (expletive deleted) green palaver? There’s loads of it aht there, an we’d be enji sufichent and all that. Thass wot we did inner noineen (expletive deleted) ighteez an we ad loadsa munny”
That was the gist of what they said. But however well-meant their intentions, their chain of reasoning suffers from two fatal flaws: availability bias, and simplification. In fact this article from Cassandra Etter-Wenzel Anupama Sen and Nadia Schroedern so utterly confronts these errors that we offer it to you more in the spirit of a master class in clear thinking than a comment on energy policy.
Availability Trap 1 Yes there is oil under the North Sea. But even if extracted, it would go straight to world markets, meaning it would have no effect on consumer energy prices in the UK.
Simplicity Trap 1 All that gas would bring down prices The precise cost of the energy (gas renewable, whatever) is called the wholesale price and consitutes only 41% of the price paid per house. The rest includes many other factors like network running costs, etc.
Availability trap 2 Ignore the potential cost savings from renewables, which would actually bring the wholesale price of energy faster
Simplicity trap 2 Ignore other factors like insulation (at which the UK is dire) which would be addressed by a renewable based modernisation policy
Availability Trap 3 Completely ignore that the UKs utter dependency on fossil fuels has led to disaster in the past (1973: 2022) and is therefore likely to do so again
And finally: nostalgia for a vanished golden age is no guide to policy whatsoever. We don’t know the name for that error, but it’s probably the biggest one of all.
Hats off to Will de Freitas of the Conversation for commissioning this exquisite article
#fossil fuels #renewables #energy #climate change #north sea
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