Unangbangkay

Cohost of @unangbangkay on Twitter

Josh Tolentino | weeaboomer, Gamist
| work: RPG Site, Game Rant, Gamecritics | ex: Siliconera, Destructoid

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mrhands
@mrhands

As most of you should know, I will watch any old slop that YouTube serves me, so when a video titled "They banned my super cheap heating! 😡 New Diesel heater hacks tested proving efficiency and safety 🤯" shows up on my homepage I am intrigued, mystified, aroused even. But watching this video is unsettling, in that something horrible lurks just outside your vision. Here's someone who recommends installing a diesel generator for your home's central heating and running it on the kerosene that you keep in a 500-liter barrel in your garden. And "the government" wants to keep this simple solution from you because it's supposedly "dangerous" to do if you don't take care to ventilate the space properly. There are much better and safer ways to heat a home. You'd have to be insane to do this. Or desparate. Throughout the video, we're swirling around a topic without giving it a proper name. The UK is in a deep energy crisis that is only getting worse.


thaliarchus
@thaliarchus

I'd hesitate to rest too much on one video, bearing in mind the Lizardman Constant (the small but consistent set of people in any sample who are complete wingnuts).

But of course it's true that the UK has an energy crisis: the UK has had an energy crisis since the shift away from coal. Although the government of the day misunderstood their objective's significance for oil transport, in their heads the Suez Crisis was in large part about access to energy. France's eventual solution was its big nuclear establishment; the UK's was oil and gas in the North Sea. (West Germany obviously did not participate in Suez, but faced the same strategic problems. Its solution was oil and gas from Russia.) The North Sea can yield only so much oil and gas.

Past government choices about financing domestic gas and electricity supply distribute a lot of the pain from these problems directly down to the poorest, but even if it had a far more compassionate energy sector internally, the UK would have an energy crisis. To some extent this is true of most European countries, which are developed but lack local energy resources—and supply neither most of the raw materials nor most of the manufacturing for renewable energy. The UK has an acute version because it industrialised and urbanised first and extremely hard.

Anyway, that's the sort of thing I think about when I wake up on a Saturday morning and wonder why I bothered.


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