How the establishment thinks in the UK about energy and the citizen's quality of life

How the establishment thinks in the UK about energy and the citizen's quality of life

Co-authored by the Royal Academy of Engineering, this past month they presented 'Critical materials: demand-side resource efficiency measures for sustainability and resilience' https://nepc.raeng.org.uk/media/qutgamxj/nepc-critical-materials-report.pdf. Oct 2024.

Among the many pearls, just to print one:

As an alternative policy focus, a significant reduction in vehicle numbers can be made through ‘modal shift’ – policies and infrastructure that enable a change from one mode of transport to another. Moving passengers from low-capacity vehicles such as cars into buses or trains allows more people to be transported per journey. This relates directly to a reduction in critical materials – a study of transport in California, US, modelled a 71% decrease in system-wide lithium demand from shifting policies away from a focus on replacing existing vehicles with EVs to e-bikes or e-buses.

As the report says, no one expects such gains of 71pct in the UK because there is much less car use, but still...

Let's remember also the thing about eating worms, our not having the right to travel via jets but slow rail, the rationing of construction and homes,our having to live with less clothes, the change from trade via ships to trains, etc. A member of Volkswagen board since Nov 2022, Julia Willie Hamburg, says (https://x.com/terran_liberty/status/1850972755916636178), translated from German:

Talking about rationing: it’s clear that if we shrink economically, we won’t have to be as poor as the British were in 1939; rather, we’d have to be as rich as the West Germans were in 1978. That is a huge difference, because we can take advantage of all the growth of the post-war period and the entire economic miracle.

The central elements of the economy would have to be rationed. First of all, living space, because cement emits endless amounts of CO2. Actually, new construction would have to be banned outright and living space rationed to 50 square metres per capita. That should actually be enough for everyone. Then meat would have to be rationed, because meat production emits enormous amounts of CO2. You don’t have to become a vegetarian, but you’ll have to eat a lot less meat.

Then train travel has to be rationed. So this idea, which many people also have – “so okay then I don’t have a car but then I always travel on the Intercity Express trains” – that won’t work either, because of course air resistance increases with speed. Yes, it’s all totally insane. Trains won’t be allowed to travel faster than 100 kilometres per hour, but you can still travel around locally quite a lot. This is all in my book, okay? But I didn’t expand on it there because I didn’t want to scare all the readers.