Transcription
I am trying to scare people because the path that we're on has consequences that are genuinely scary.
I want to start with a confession. I knew very little about net zero and climate change before I spoke to Katherine Porter. And I think that's deliberate because what she told me is that the people running our energy system are counting on you not understanding it. Katherine is going to break it down for you. Watch it through because by the end of this you'll understand exactly what's coming and why they don't want you to know.
Is net zero the new religion? It bears so many hallmarks of religion. 6 to 8,000 people per year were dying in the UK because they couldn't adequately heat their homes.
There have been death threats, haven't they?
I've had two that I've had to report to the police. Where I do think we're starting to get something sinister is when you see that's potentially scarier than all of the propaganda around zero.
This doesn't pass the smell test. I have actually never felt physically sick by a policy announcement before. This whole model is starting to crumble. And what are we seeing from elites in the West? We're seeing, wow, something that almost nobody's talking about. The Scottish grid is going to stop working. It is a straight up experiment. People in Scotland might just have no electricity. I think we're going to go through some very hard times before it gets better.
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This is a really interesting one. Um, you've been saying things that I think the BBC and our politicians, our government have been choosing to ignore for some time now. Uh, our friend Peter McCormack, he asked you if you are just scaremongering, but should we be scared? Yeah. And that's the answer I gave to him that I am trying to scare people because um, the path that we're on has consequences that are genuinely scary.
We saw the Spanish blackout in April last year. 11 people died directly. We knew on the day that 11 people lost their lives, one person in Portugal and 10 people in Spain. And then subsequent research um attributed 165 excess deaths to the two days covered by the blackout. It was primarily women over the age of 80 in Spain. So, and then also up until about 2023, um the Office of National Statistics was publishing um mortal excess mortality data for the UK associated with fuel poverty and on average 6 to 8,000 people per year were dying in the UK because they couldn't adequately heat their homes. So, we see that expensive energy and insecure energy put people's lives at risk. You know, there's a real jeopardy here that that just gets overlooked. I mean, I think it's a massive scandal that thousands of people a year are dying every winter because they can't keep their homes properly in a supposedly rich country like the UK. And I'm sure that those numbers are higher now, but O and stopped um stopped publishing them.
One of the issues I think around around this is a lot of people are not number literate or they're not into economics and and things. So, I know you'll explain it in a way and I think that's what you do so well. You explain it in a way that people who don't know about this can actually start to understand because people do need to. But first, I want to just ask you about the reactions to you pushing back against net zero. There have been death threats, haven't there?
I've had two that I've had to report to the police. Yes.
Why are people uh and we were talking about it just off air uh before about the sort of the the cultish ideology? Uh why do you think people get so wound up about defending net zero?
So, I think there's a set of people that's been persuaded that the client is facing an existential threat. And if you look at the way the media portrays a lot of stories about weather and climate, I mean, literally, you cannot um look at the news about the weather without them making some reference to climate change. And you know, sometimes I'll comment about this because you'll get, you know, January the 1st, it's the hottest day of the year so far. January the second, what it's the hottest day of the year so far. And you're like, no. You know, and I'm like, unless it's no, if it's the hottest day of the year in October, then that that's newsworthy. the hottest day of the year in anything up to June or July really not so much. Like any day in the first half of the year could legitimately normally be the hottest day of the year. And yet somehow you thought, "Oh yeah, it's the hottest day of the year." And then there's some reference to climate change. Um, and so you go on to social media and you see a huge amount of people very frightened by this.
You know, people talking about things like the planet is boiling, the oceans are boiling. The boiling point of salt water is about 102 degrees C. Like if the ocean was actually boiling, everybody would have died already. Like we would not be here to experience that. There is no evidence that we're getting anywhere close to ex existential threat with climate. know I'm not a climate scientist and I deliberately try to avoid getting into that territory but and but I think there's a huge number of people who also are not climate scientists who've somehow been persuaded that this is the single biggest threat that we face out of every type of threat and that is just not rational when you look at the evidence um we're not seeing you know, the fact is that more people die from cold than heat so for most of the world heating and warming would be better fewer people would die in the UK if we had warmer a warmer climate. Now, I'm not suggesting that as a reason to try and create a warmer climate, like let's pollute the hell out of everything and you know, who cares? But I think we have to have rationality when it comes to this. Mhm.
And so when you have um unsophisticated views where most people aren't climate scientists and they get fed these inflated narratives and it's interesting if you go back and look at something like the Guardian in 2000 was writing about how by 2020 London would be underwater. Um the Netherlands would be underwater. Uh the Arctic would be ice free in the summer. Like none of that's happened.
Did they make those uh prognosis? Yeah. Yeah. But you literally you can go back and look on the Guardian website in like 2004. I think they had some stories about that. So.
So actually all just about none of the big dramatic predictions that have been made around climate have happened have come true.
Made some didn't they? Lots of people have made some. There's been all sorts of but then you go back to like the 70s they were thinking that we were going to have a new ice age and they were really worried about everyone freezing. So, so my I have a master's degree in physics and although I didn't study climate and weather, I know that weather and climate are what we call mathematically complex um systems. So, and complexity is a specific mathematical term. It's related to chaos theory, but it's not quite chaos theory. And essentially what it means is it's extraordinarily difficult to model. You know, so we struggle to forecast the weather a week out and yet somehow we think we have confidence in forecasting climate, you know, decades out and none of these predictions have been coming true.
Could Could it be that that they've exaggerated it, they've sensationalized it to sell the idea, but the, you know, you don't it doesn't have to be boiling point for some of the ice to melt, for example, and waters to rise.
Exactly. Because water melts at the melting point, not the boiling point. You're like a 100 Celsius apart. But but the trouble is that that lack of scientific literacy that you mentioned. So you get um certain sets of the public and I think this is you know, they'll have some predisposition to fear and believing things that they see and the media sensationalizing things because obviously they'll get more clicks if they link everything to tragedy and drama and so on. Um, and so then they they get very frightened by it and then they think that it's more important than everything else. This is the single thing that we need to focus on to the exclusion of everything else and to the point of irrationality. So they will then think it's okay to push policies that harm people because they've they've lost that link between what is it you're trying to prevent in the first place?
Yes. Exactly. So if you were to break it down into its raw components, why do you want to prevent climate change? Well, okay, there's some people who just want to do it for its own sake, but most people would be like, well, we think it's going to harm lives and livelihoods. And you go, okay, right. So, is it rational to then introduce policies that have a high risk of harming lives and livelihoods in an effort to prevent harm to lives and livelihoods of future people and it might not even happen.
Well, okay. So, there's that whole point. We have a society that struggles to invest in its own future in terms of pension provision. And yet somehow we think that these people are all going to be falling over themselves to protect someone else's future.
And that's reflected in the data. You do polling and you say, "Do you care about the climate?" And everyone goes, "Well, of course I care about the climate because you know what sort of a psychopath doesn't care about the climate?" Then you say, "Well, how much would you be willing to spend of your own money to uh prevent climate change?" and they go hm £10 a year. And you're like, okay, because you actually don't care about it that much then.
Yeah, that's interesting and that that's why uh it aligns I think you were talking about this sort of Spanish Inquisition and things like that in in terms of how it's taken over our mainstream TV our news and and people feel like they have to uh say it otherwise they're bad people.
Yeah. I mean, so it's essentially a delusion built out of a lack of scientific literacy and um lack of sort of credible information. And if you think back to the 16th century and the Protestant Reformation, you that was a world where modern science didn't exist the way we know it today. And people had very unsophisticated beliefs and there was large amounts of superstition because people had a low level of understanding of the world in which they moved.
And people held and it was almost ubiquitous. Everybody thought this. If you did not follow the one true faith, you would burn in hell for eternity. And so some people went to extraordinary lengths to convert people to what they believed was the one true faith because if you think that they'll burn in hell for eternity if they don't follow the one true faith and kind of by definition you think that you do then you can do just about every horrible torture to them to make them come over to your side to avoid this horrible outcome. You think you're doing it for their own good and for the good of their immortal soul. And this was so this this it wasn't controversial during the Protestant Reformation to be burning people who didn't subscribe to your brand of Christianity. This was mainstream.
Is net zero the new religion?
And so yeah, it it bears so many hallmarks of religion. You have a lack of um scientific rigor particularly around the policy impact. You know, you you don't see cost-benefit analyses that say, well, actually, climate change will cost X, but these actions we're trying to do to prevent climate change are costing X plus something. So, maybe mitigation might be cheaper, and let's look at that instead or as well or some combination. 2050 is a completely arbitrary target. One degree Celsius is a completely arbitrary target. So, there's this there's a lack of um rigor in some of these. I want to say there's the lack of scientific foundation. There is some scientific foundation behind it, but it's not consistent and it's not comprehensive. Um, and you have low levels of scientific literacy across the population. So, people just can't say this doesn't pass the smell test.
And we saw this hugely in CO. When that first lockdown was announced by Boris Johnson, I have actually never felt physically sick by a policy announcement before. It made me feel ill because I could see what would happen. I knew it was going to destroy the health service. I knew it was going to kill education. I knew there a lot of people would be harmed by it. And I knew ultimately it wouldn't make any difference. One thing I did not hear a single person say during CO was this. Every pandemic in recorded history has expired by itself in low double digit months. You do nothing, it goes away by itself.
What about the black plague?
Right. So that wasn't technically a pandemic. um that was that was different. Um, and that one did persist for longer. It was actually very interesting because it completely changed the social basis of Europe. Um, but if you look at the Spanish flu and all the other sort of virus-based um pandemics, they just go away in low double digit months.
What is?
And actually to prevent the black death, I mean, you did have to go to extreme levels of isolation where the people inside the isolation ring all died. Um, and everyone else had a chance of survival. So.
That would have been quite that would have been quite politically uh challenging decision to make.
Gruesome all of that. Um, what about blackouts? You mentioned blackouts before. Why why are they happening? And that's potentially scarier than all of what's all of the propaganda around uh net zero.
Yes. And what was worrying about Spain? I mean, it was good for them because it happened in very benign weather. It was it was the end of April. It wasn't hot yet, but it wasn't cold. And so being without power, although it was obviously quite uh dangerous to elderly people. Um, it would have been far worse. I mean, here if you had that in December or January, you could expect much higher mortality. Um, but again, you'll say, well, given it was so neutral, you didn't have a big air conditioning load or a big heating load. So the system wasn't stressed. So why did it happen? So much misinformation about this. But if you go to Red Electric Despania, the system operator's own report, um, it describes the sequence of events and it said, "Okay, in the morning of that day, we uh identified some disturbances on the grid. Now, some of these desri dist disturbances they described as being normal. I worry about that because I think it's essentially normalization of deviancy. What happened with the Challenger disaster. Like they knew the O-rings were a bit rubbish, but they kept sending the shuttles up with them anyway because they hadn't failed so far. So, we think it'll all be good. And then seven astronauts died. So, um, if you start to normalize deviants, that can come back and bite you. But nevertheless, they got these disturbances and they were able to sort of dampen them a little bit, but the grid was in a fragile state because it's this was the disturbance was actually traced back to a faulty solar inverter. So inverters are things that convert direct currents which is what renewables will laterally generate to alternating current which is what the grid is based on. So that's where you have voltage and current just vary in a a wave shape like this. And so you need electronic components that will take the electricity generated by wind and solar and batteries and put them into this alternating form that the entire grid is designed and engineered around. So they had this bit of electronics that was doing that job and it malfunctioned and so the um the voltage that it was outputting onto the grid was unstable and it caused a ripple essentially across the grid of this voltage disturbance.
And um, and what you had was a low level of conventional generation operating that day. So the conventional generation is what creates that current and voltage wave in the first place and you need that to be set up and maintained in a stable way.
Um, it's a little bit like playing jump rope at school. You know, if the rope isn't turning in a predictable way then the children jumping will jump out because they'll be like, I don't want to get hit by the rope. And new children won't jump in for the same reason. And that is essentially how the grid works. Your renewables are like the children. They won't jump in and participate in the grid. But if most of your energy is coming from renewables and they don't want to play because they don't like the way the rope's behaving, then you can run out of electricity and the grid can break.
Is this something that's going to happen more often around Europe?
Yes. Yeah. And it's happening here already. We're seeing these effects in Scotland. So they had this initial ripple and they sort of managed to dampen it, but the grid was in a fragile state. Then in the middle of the day, a whole load of solar um farms turned off because prices went negative. Now, um, when you when you've got your rope turning, the the speed that it's turning at, so your the rate with which your current and voltage changes, um, is linked to supply and demand. So, if your demand gets bigger than supply, it basically tries to slow it down.
And all the electrical equipment is really sensitive to this. So, it go if it goes too slow, then everything just turns off and disconnects because the equipment will break. So, they have protection measures that say, "Oh, that's getting a bit low. We'll turn ourselves off because otherwise we might break and you want that because otherwise it you know, if it breaks it could be months and months before it gets fixed.
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Because the prices went negative. So negative prices mean you have to pay somebody when you sell your electricity. You give them the electricity and you give them money. So who wants to do that?
That's mental. So they turned off and that caused the frequency of the grid to drop. So the speed of the current and voltage then fell which is a normal response. If your generation declines, your frequency falls. So but because the grid was fragile, a lot of these wind and solar farms that don't create this grid themselves, they don't do it in a native way. Um, they disconnected. Now, they actually didn't meet their grid code uh requirements there because the grids code says basically you've got to survive the frequency dropping to a certain level and they didn't basically they disconnected before the frequency dropped to that point. But then guess what happened? You lost a whole load more generation frequency fell down even more. The frequency then fell below the level specified in the grid code. So conventional generation started to disconnect the nuclear power stations, hydroelectric power stations in the interconnectors. So Iberia then became islanded. They lost the link to France and the link to Morocco and everything turned itself off and within seconds it cascaded into failure because every piece of equipment on the grid, their protection system went, "Oh my god, it's gone too low. Disconnect." And the voltage and current just went to zero.
In in Britain, is there any one particular person who's who's responsible for this?
No.
So, if all the lights go off the next winter, who do we go to?
Nobody.
Right. This How have we gotten ourselves into this situation?
Um, well, okay, it's a variety of reasons. So when the electricity the gas and electricity grids were or markets were privatized in the 1980s and I don't want to go back and say oh privatization is to blame because I don't think privatization is responsible but it's um the way we what we set up in privatization reflected the world that existed then and hasn't been amended enough to reflect the world that exists now. So we started off with the electricity system privatized in 1987. Um between 1987 and 2001 we had a system called the power pool of England and Wales. And effectively you had a system operator. It was national grid that um set the prices and decided what generation was going to run based on the prices that they were submitting. And it was a relatively straightforward system because the generation was a small number of big generators and so it was actually quite predictable. Now they felt there was some issues with it. There was some gaming going on information asymmetries. They just basically thought it wasn't the most efficient way to do it. So then in 2000 they decided they change to a very imaginatively named system called the new electricity trading arrangements which is what we have now called NEA. And now this system was what we call self-dispatched. So all of the generators connected to the transmission system um every single half an hour so the market's broken down into half hourly chunks they send to NISO the national energy system operator what we call a final physical notification that says we are going to do this at this particular in this settlement period this half hourly chunk and they have to do that by one hour before the start of that um settlement period and then what Nisso does is and and it does this on a national basis. But of course, the grid doesn't work on a national basis. It has to balance every point in the grid all the time. Your supply and demand have to be close enough together to keep your voltage and current moving at the right rate. So then the NISO does what we call balancing actions. It'll say, "Okay, well, you need to turn up a bit. You need to turn down a bit. We can't move that electricity from over there to here. So you're going to have to turn down. And you hear you've got to turn up and and then somebody trips off because I know the rubber band breaks so you go okay fine oh no they just tripped so we need to go and turn this up over here um they have to hold reserve that protects against the single biggest source of in feed onto the grid at the moment we have two interconnectors that are 1.4 4 gigawatts and they're the biggest that's called the biggest in in feed loss and they have to hold reserve against that and we have some very cool stuff on the grid. We have the biggest uh pumped hydro power station in Europe 1,800 megawatts that can go from zero to full load in 16 seconds. I mean that's amazing if you want to take a gas power station from zero like true zero cold because they had this in Spain. They realized that they were in trouble and that they needed to bring up more conventional generation. And so they call up some gas power stations and they're like, "How soon can you synchronize?" And they're like, "Well, we've been off for 3 weeks, so like 2 hours at least." And the grid fell over within 2 hours. If you're hot, you can bring your gas power station. So if you ran a few hours ago, you can go from zero to full load in 25 minutes.
Wow.
Um, but if you're stone cold, it'll be hours.
I see.
And so so this is what NISO is juggling with all the time. They've got different um all the generators have said what they're capable of doing. They've said what they'll charge to change the plan that they had and then Nisso balances it. Um, but the difficulty is is that so that in 2000 was relatively simple because you didn't have that many generators and it was quite predictable. You had variation on demand because demand was linked to the weather.
You know, people turn their heating up when it's cold. It gets dark really early in the winter, so you put your lights on. And this week we had the clocks changed. So last week the peak of electricity demand every day was in the evening. This week is in the morning because of the impacts of the hour changing.
I see.
It's actually it's really dramatic. It flips like so quickly. So, but but now we have a huge amount of generation that's connected to the low voltage grid that the system operator can't even see because it can only see what's on the high voltage grid. And instead of having a small number of big generators, there's thousands and thousands of generators connected both to the transmission system and the low voltage distribution system. So now this is an extremely complex system to manage and some in some half hourly periods NISO is making 30,000 balancing instructions.
Mhm.
And the cost of this is more than doubled. So the normal normally it'll cost 2 million pounds a day to balance the grid. On cold days it can be 10 times that.
So at like 8th of January last year we had a near miss. Uh, we came within about five or six hundred megawatts of running out of electricity and um, the it cost more than 20 million pounds or like £22 million that day to balance the grid.
Yes.
Okay. So these are the concerns and so is it fair to say that this whole net zero idea is is this a luxury belief?
It is. And who's?
Oh, totally a luxury belief. Okay. So I'm actually going to Namibia in two weeks to go and speak at a conference. Every time I've been at events where there have been African delegates, they have said, "We do not have a climate crisis. We have a poverty crisis. Our priority is to industrialize." And we we think natural gas is the root to that. Methane, I don't know why we call methane natural gas like most gases are natural. It's not like hydrogen's unnatural or oxygen, but whatever. Um, so we think methane effectively is is the route to doing that. And the people who talk about, oh, we need to we need net zero and we need to get away from oil and gas, they have never experienced insecure energy. They've never experienced insecure access to food. Methane is the key ingredient in synthetic fertilizer. Now, with what's happening at the moment um at in cattle and with the strait of Hormuz, people are starting to get concerned about fertilizer production. In 2001, Sri Lanka banned synthetic fertilizers. So, you cannot use fertilizer made out of methane. And this was in April 2001, uh, 2021. And like Greenpeace and people like, "Yay, you're so amazing. You're leading the world. Everyone should follow your example." In the November, they dropped the ban. In between April and November, they went from being an exporter of rice to not being able to feed their own people. They had food riots, one of the fastest economic collapses in history, and they had to get an IMF bailout.
Whoa. So did Sri Lanka do that in the first place to sort of look kind of woke?
Essentially. Yeah.
Woke Sri Lanka.
I mean, they did some other like bad things at the same time but this this fertilizer ban was huge. Like literally they couldn't feed their own people anymore.
And and the other thing is like you walk into a hospital and you apart from people find something that's not made out of oil.
The floor is made out of oil. The walls are covered in oil. The ceiling is made out of oil. The windows are made out of oil. The doors are made out of oil. The beds are made out of oil. The chairs are made out of oil. The machines are made out of oil. IVs are made out of oil. The syringes are made out of oil. And the drugs inside them are made out of oil. Almost every medication licensed for use in the NHS is made out of oil.
Could we run out of oil?
No. I don't really believe in the peak oil thing, but just good luck stopping oil. Seriously.
It seems completely crazy.
None of this would be possible without oil. This is made out of oil.
Do you think there's there are people behind it who benefit from the idea of net zero who are pushing this?
Well, so you definitely got the subsidy farmers in the renewable space.
Um, and you know, you've got companies like EOT electricity. They are allowed to charge more than the price cap for a green tariff. Now, you're constantly being told renewables are cheap. So, how come the green tariff is higher than the price cap?
What does that actually mean? Say that again. Okay, so the price cap is the regulated tariff that we all have access to and that's determined by offgem and it's based on the cost of uh the grid as it is essentially. So you can so that's going to be a big chunk of gas generation and nuclear and hydro and biomass which we call net uh zero carbon but actually is worse than coal when it comes to emissions. Um, but you get whatever's on the grid. Yeah.
Now, there are about three suppliers that have a special license to provide what's called a green tariff. And this is where they've uh where they can essentially guarantee that all of the electricity is coming from renewable sources.
Now, I think it's still a fudge because there are times when the renewable sources just simply aren't generating enough to supply these people. Um, but they do it by buying from different places and getting some certificates and stuff. I mean, it's it's more sophisticated than most of what people call green tariffs and they have to get this audited by offgem to be allowed to do it, but they're allowed to charge they're allowed to be outside the price cap then they don't have to stick to the price cap and they all they charge more.
Wow.
So, you're like, well, okay.
So, you're paying more for the renewable energy. Everybody's constantly saying renewables are cheap. Like I don't like renewables aren't cheap. The evidence doesn't support that claim. People think renewables are cheap because the wind and the sun are free. And renewables have a very low what we call short-run marginal cost of generation because there's no fuel. But the machines that you need to turn the wind and the sun into electricity are extremely expensive. We pay billions of pounds a year in subsidies. Even on that subsidy level, almost all of the time, it's cheaper to generate electricity with gas.
I can show you a chart that demonstrates how even in 2022 when gas prices went absolutely crazy, uh, renewables didn't really protect us from that. So you um so you have this issue the machines are expensive and the subsidy is huge but then the infrastructure that you need to deliver electricity to consumers so that they get every time they press the light switch the light comes on and it doesn't matter if it's windy or sunny or how many other people are pressing the light switch or what time of the day it is the light always comes on to guarantee that when you have lots of stuff that depends on the weather is extremely expensive.
I see.
You need backup generation. Also, the wind and the solar have what we call low energy density. So, you don't get very much bang for your buck for each wind turbine and solar panel. If I want to build an 800 megawatt gas power station, which is a decent size gas power station, I just need one grid connection. We typically build them in places where there's good infrastructure already. An 800 megawatt wind turbine is uh wind farm is 60 turbines, but it's only going to work a third of the time. Your gas power station will work more than 90% of the time. So to get the same electricity per year, you'd need three times more wind turbines. So that's 180 times more wind turbines that all need to be connected. Now, they don't all connect every single one to the grid. They connect to a hub, but that's still a massive amount more copper and wires than you would have for your conventional power station. And you're putting this stuff in places where there isn't existing infrastructure like the North of Scotland and the North Sea.
So how has this become such a key agenda? Some people say it's a globalist agenda to keep us cold and poor. But the why?
That seems a bit conspiracy theorist.
Why would they want to keep us cold and poor?
Well, okay. I think the argument is that some elites want to stay elite and therefore they want to make sure nobody else gets. I mean, it's a little bit like the the Tsars or the aristocrats before the French Revolution. You know, they don't care how miserable the, you know, the peasants are as long as they remain peasants and don't cause too much trouble. Um, now I don't believe that there's some I don't believe in global conspiracies full stop because I just don't think human beings are capable of that level of covert organization over sustained periods of time. However, I do think that we are approaching a societal shift because our governance models that we've had since the cold war are essentially running out of steam. I think when the cold war finished, Western governments formed a belief that even 9/11 didn't change that the existential threats that the Cold War presented had gone away. And if you're no longer facing an existential threat, you shift your priorities. And so the priorities started to become let's do things nicely, let's be nice. So, and some of it started out being good, you know, let's not fire pregnant people for being pregnant. Let's not uh just put crap in the drinking water, you know, but now it's it's just gone too far. Now you're forcing EDF to spend hundreds of millions of pounds to save a half a trawler full of fish per year at Hinckley Point when we throw more than that fish back in the sea because we caught the wrong type and all the rest of it in the fishing industry. And like really at the end of the day, who cares about a boatload of fish? So to your point about the the conspiracy theory I suppose of the elites or the Davos elite class want the rest of us to be cold and poor because they don't care about us. I suppose you could actually say in a more realistic way it's not that they don't care. It's that they are they're doing well, they're comfortable and they're fine and they're maybe trading off uh the comfort of many of the poorest people so that they can look good. But that requires a certain level of cynical thinking process that I just don't think they're doing.
But it might be subconscious.
Well, it could be, but they're not stupid people for the most part.
But that's So then what explains it because does it does feel like they're going, "Well, these people are all going to be impoverished by it, but I'm going to feel really good about myself."
Right. So, but that but what we're getting is that Spanish Inquisition thing. It's for their own good.
Yeah.
So, they think it's for everybody's good, not just their personal good. That. So the conspiracy theory assumes that the elites are doing it so that they remain rich and everyone else is poor and that they don't care because that maintains the order which keeps them at the top of the pile. I think it's that they don't um they don't worry about the economic impact it'll have on people because it won't really affect them and they basically think it's for everybody's good anyway and so you just have to suck it up.
Yeah, that's probably more accurate. And but where I do think we're starting to get something sinister is when you see um when you see like eras moving when you you see the end of one era and the beginning of the next which is kind of what I think we're coming to because this cold war thing that I was talking about with all the regulation we funded it with masses and masses of debt and we had a huge expansion of the state. So the state started doing all sorts of things it didn't used to do. Previously the state just basically made sure that you didn't starve to death if you lost your job, right? So working and society had this notion that you worked because you didn't want to starve to death and you wanted a roof over your head. I mean, it it was pretty straightforward. Whereas now people think, well, I should be able to take two foreign holidays a year and have a Sky subscription and a mobile phone and a nice car and wear what I like and blah blah blah. And so this we've we've sort of developed this sense of entitlement and it's pretty much all been funded through debt.
But if you look at what's happened with borrowing costs, we're starting to see the markets pushing back. We're starting to see you've borrowed as much as you can. We're not quite there yet. France is probably closer than we are, but our our gilts, our borrowing costs for government borrowing are really high. And we have the highest tax burden now since the 1940s. Do we feel like we're getting public services that justify that? I certainly don't. So this whole model is starting to crumble. And what are we seeing? What are we seeing from elites in the West? We're seeing efforts to control speech. We're seeing Mark Carney in Canada wants to pass a law that makes it illegal to criticize climate policies.
Wow.
Yeah. Emmanuel Macron has been talking about constraining speech. Ursula von der Leyen wants to create essentially a ministry of truth that she controls within the EU that decides what truth is at the European level. We see in the UK two-tier justice. Somebody can go to prison for 31 months for writing a tweet that they then take down after four hours and apologize for and yet you commit the worst crimes against children and get 30 months. And I can point to a specific case of that.
Right. So we are now punishing speech more heavily than violence.
Yeah.
Than actual violence.
That's even crept into as a slight aside into football because it's my pet peeve. I'm a big football fan. And there was a player last year who said that a Korean player looked like the Korean player's cousin. It was sort of a joke. And he got banned for seven games. If you break someone's leg, you get banned for three games.
Oh my god. What's wrong with saying you look like your cousin? Like most people look like their cousin. Well, it's a joke that Asians will look alike. It's not a nice joke.
If you have a cousin, you probably look a bit like your cousin. That's the whole point of being related to people is you look like them.
But I think the joke was that Koreans were but even so maybe maybe you can, you know, slap on the wrist because the person wasn't their cousin that that that would potentially be racist, but relatives typically look similar to each other.
I think the way he said it was probably slightly racist. But again, double the number of like more than double the punishment for breaking someone's leg. That's that's where they've completely they've gone nuts.
And I I've come to the belief that we shouldn't restrict speech at all.
Even hate speech.
I I think the only exception I would make actually is where you've got people encouraging vulnerable people to self-harm.
Okay?
Because our laws are pretty clear. If somebody says to me, "Oh, go kill that black person," then well, I know that killing people, whether they're black or not, is a crime, and so I'm just going to say no. But what about the coercive nature say of an example might be an imam who is preaching to his flock to go and kill a Jew.
But you still know that killing a Jew is a crime or killing anybody is a crime.
So you think the imam is not responsible at all?
I think that once you start drawing lines about what speech is allowed or isn't allowed, you're on a slippery slope. So obviously I don't think the imam should be saying that or I don't think the racist should be encouraging you to go and kill black people. But
People have to take accountability for their actions.
You know that murder is a crime. Doesn't matter who told you it was okay to do it. You know it's a crime. You know it's not okay.
But people become as as with the Spanish Inquisition, people do get sort of cultified, don't they?
But I think we have to look at other ways of dealing with that that aren't around controlling speech. So the where I would make where I would draw the line is self-harm isn't a crime. So if you say I think you should kill yourself, killing yourself is not a crime. So you don't have that um constraint on the act if you like of it being a crime and the people who are likely to self-harm are likely to be quite vulnerable and not capable of withstanding that potential pressure. So I would that's where I would put the line. I would say usually you can't go around encouraging people to end their own lives or harm themselves in some way because that is essentially a harm that we can't easily mitigate through other means. Whereas the go kill somebody else, we can mitigate throughout through other means because it's already illegal, right? So as long as you follow the law, you know that you don't go around killing people. It doesn't matter who tells you, you know, as a parent if your child has been naughty and the other one said, "Oh yeah, my brother made me do it." And what's always been the answer to that? Well, if your brother told you to jump off a cliff, would you do that? You know,
This is like the age, oh, like everybody knows this expression from childhood. And so somehow as adults, we're exempt from the whole, yeah, I know killing people's wrong, so.
No, I did it anyway.
I agree with you in in theory. My only concern is, you know, then then do we absolve the likes of Jim Jones, you know, the Jonestown massacre? Do we absolve the Heaven's Gate cult? Do we absolve any of these kind of cult leaders? Uh, of of their the way they incentivize people to do.
They were doing a whole load of illegal stuff as well.
So it's pretty easy to get those people out of doing what they're doing because you just prosecute them for the crimes they're committing.
Yeah. Well, you know, it's an interesting thought. I mean, it's it's such a complicated discussion, the free speech one. And there are other issues as well like defamation, right? Is it should it be allowed for someone to just print whatever they want about someone? Is that is that an impingement upon free speech? So I think but we already draw a distinction between opinion and alleging fact. So.
You can't you can't opine that somebody had uh done something to a child say uh without abs you know, you need the evidence even if it's true if you don't have the.
No no there's I think the law makes a distinction you can say um I we could say I think that um so I was actually legitimately asked this question when I was in North America recently. So let's use this as an example. I think Ed Miliband is um a traitor that he's in the pockets of the Chinese. Okay, so that is that would be protected speech because I've said I think in my opinion Ed Miliband is working for the Chinese. I'm not saying this is by the.
way. This is just an example. But um, where it would become defamatory is if you say it's a fact that Ed Milliband is working for the Chinese.
Okay. Right. So those two are different. One is very clearly, "Oh, I'm just expressing an opinion." And I might be wrong because that's the definition of an opinion.
I think if you said, "I think so and so is a P word," you'd still be—
No, Elon Musk said that about that diver, and he got off because—
Well, fair enough. Um—
—because, because what the courts then look at is, would a reasonable person think that this is what's this is a real accusation?
And you just had a case in the US. So you remember that guy who, it was called Afroman?
Yes.
And he, he had that song about getting high.
Yes.
So recently, um, the police raided his house because they'd had a tip-off that he had some drug operation and bizarrely, I mean, this, I don't understand why the police fall for this one so often. Some kind of child abuse kidnap ring running out of his basement.
And apparently, they did a whole load of damage to his property and his house, and he alleges that they stole some of his money. Um, so to get his own back, he just started making songs about them. And the song started out being, "You broke my gate. Are you going to give me some money back?" But then they moved on to this specific policeman is a—
Yeah.
—does bad things to children. But in the song, he was basically saying, and he'd written tweets and stuff as well, that the guy was doing it in public, in like, at police community events and so on. So anyway, then this police officer sued Afroman. And, um, so I don't remember his actual name.
Um—
Neither, neither does he, likely.
And essentially, the court said, like, nobody actually believed that. Right. I know you came out and flat out said that he's—
—abusing children in public, but nobody actually thinks that's true because who does that stuff in the middle of the street and in the middle, like, in broad daylight and all the rest of it? Clearly, it's some sort of hyperbole. The, the, you know, the courts make that distinction. I know that's in the US, not here, but it's pretty similar.
No, I think—
We had that issue with the Joey Barton stuff. We had some of the things that he's said and some, you know, online. We've had that where people are, you know, thinking—
—accusing each other of racism and—
—stuff about bike nongs. And I, I, I struggled—
But, but was he, but did he win or not? I, I need to look at it properly, but Joey lost on quite a few of the bits, but I don't know if there's a specific one.
Oh, right. Okay.
Joey, Joey, who has been accused of saying it, who did say it. I mean, who could really believe from bike nongs, anyway?
What is that? He likes young bikes.
Yeah, exactly. I know. Niche, but probably not illegal.
Yeah, rude, insulting, but, but, yeah, I thought a lot of that was ridiculous. Shouldn't. But, but, you know, I, I understand both sides.
What?
By the way, I just want to make it very clear that I'm not alleging that Ed Milliband is a Chinese agent.
But I was legitimately asked about that.
Um, in North America, people were saying, "We just can't understand what he's doing. So it seems to us that the only possible explanation is that he's a traitor." And I'm like, "No, I think he's just deep in the ideology now."
Which ideology?
Yeah, the, the net zero ideology. Because if you listen to what he said, well, first of all, if you watch videos of him talking—
—he actually looks a little bit deranged.
Sandwiched, but he looks like that when he's eating a sandwich, doesn't he? Unfortunately.
The whole, it's practically frothing at the mouth and you can't seem to talk without jabbing his finger.
It, it just looks, there's something off about the way if you just watch him with the sound off, it just doesn't look like somebody who's—
—playing with a full deck, should we say.
Yeah.
Um—
That might just be unfortunate for him. He might be just one of those guys who's got a funny disposition.
But it's the mannerisms.
Funny mannerisms.
Yeah. The jabbing his finger and the—
Well, it just, do people talk like this normally? Like, if I'm not extremely exercised about something, am I like—
What are the, in a very simplified way for, for those who have not followed a lot of this, what are the allegations or what, what, what is Ed Milliband doing?
So his policies are just not coherent. So now he's saying, "Oh, this gas crisis, it means it proves that we need to get off gas and renewables the answer." Okay, so let's examine this.
His policy for renewables is to have a 95% clean power system in 2030. So you're only using gas about 5% of the time. But electricity is less than 20% of energy demand in the UK.
So here's he's like, "Yeah, we've got to electrify everything so that everybody's using electricity instead of gas." So we don't actually have any electrification targets for transport or for industry. The only specific electrification target we have is in heating. And there they want to install 600,000 heat pumps per year. I think they've actually just lowered that, but 600,000. Let's go with the 600,000. 600,000 heat pumps per year to electrify domestic heating. We have 28.6 million households in the UK. It will take 47 years to put heat pumps in all the ones that don't already have a heat pump. There's only about 300,000 heat pumps already installed.
Yeah.
Okay. Does Ed Milliband have any strategy for securing gas supplies in a cheap, secure, and affordable way for 47 years? No.
He talks about, "We have to get off gas because it's, it makes us very exposed to dictators." Most of our gas comes from Norway or the United States. I think it's a very niche view that Norway is a dictatorship. I know that some people might argue that the US leadership isn't exactly—
—whatever, but still not a dictatorship. You couldn't by any stretch really call the US president a dictator.
No.
So that's not true. We're literally not buying our gas from dictators.
So, so then—
But where's most of the stuff for renewables coming from?
China.
I see.
What could you call China?
A dictatorship.
And he says, "Oh, well, we're going to have all these green jobs." Now, we're currently losing a thousand highly paid, highly skilled jobs per month in the North Sea. People losing these jobs are actually leaving the country. They're going to other parts of the world where oil and gas production is not being forced into decline. We have almost no green jobs here, and the ones that are here are pretty low paid, like installation jobs. He's all over social media last week saying, "Oh, Vestas is going to build a turbine factory and it's going to employ 500 people." Whoop-de-doo. Like that's one factory, 500 people. What about the thousand jobs per month that are being lost in the North Sea?
So then I want to go back to and maybe push plot a little bit more, and I think you probably agree actually, about the maybe the conspiracy angle, the angle that there are people who are are really, you know, elites in it for themselves, getting paid off, and so on. I know we can't say that about Ed Milliband specifically, but that it might seem that way with a lot of these people in the energy industry who are looking for net zero.
So some people benefit hugely from subsidies.
Some people have got very rich out of that.
Um, but a few people getting rich from a niche area of the energy industry does not constitute a conspiracy. So for me, the conspiracy argument suggests a level of organization that I just don't think is present.
Okay. But they still, you can still suggest elites in it for themselves.
No. Yeah. But that's not the same as a conspiracy.
No. No. But I'm still interested in that, in that point.
Yeah. It's not, I don't think it's a controversial thing to suggest that some elites will be in it for themselves, just like some of everybody is in it for themselves. And there'll be others who are not, who are more in it for more altruistic reasons. And then you'll have some people who, um, so I can think of one energy CEO that has more than once given up his bonus because he didn't feel it was right to take it because of the cost of living and various other things. Um, I don't agree with all the things that he argues for. He's the CEO of a huge company. He's obviously not doing it primarily for the money because otherwise he wouldn't be turning down his bonuses, like voluntarily turning them down. So, I think we can really exclude, at least short-term financial motivation. But maybe he just really likes his job. And so that's self-interest, isn't it? Yeah. You know, if you really like what you do, but then obviously, it's not reasonable to expect people to do jobs in misery. So, I don't think there's any kind of pure thing where you're 100% doing something for an altruistic reason, but it's just not always about money.
What, what about Star? He's recently come out and said that energy bills are going to go down for everyone. What's, what's really going on there?
Yeah, they're just moving the cost of taxation. I mean, so the bills, yeah, the bills are going down, but why are they going down? Because they've just taken a big chunk of subsidy cost from bills into taxation. So, I actually agree that moving the subsidy cost into taxation is the right thing to do because it's less regressive. But don't be telling people that you're fixing the cost of living by doing that. You've just increased taxation by 7 to 8 billion pounds a year when we already have the highest tax burden since the 1940s.
Won't that just affect the richest though?
No, it doesn't because most people still do pay tax. I, pretty much everybody pays tax because you've got VAT.
So—
—it's not just income tax that we're talking about here.
Um, so that if you're going to take, if you're going to take 7 to 8 billion pounds out of bills and put it into taxation, then you have to fund that.
Yeah.
With higher taxes.
This is kind of a way that politicians sneakily get around things, right?
Right. So, if they say they've lowered energy bills, that's correct. If they say they've lowered energy costs, that's incorrect because the cost is still there. And if they say they're addressing the cost of living, that's also incorrect because they've just moved this cost to taxation, which most people are subject to. They didn't say it's not been moved specifically to income tax. It's been moved to taxation. So, everybody pays tax one way or another.
What's the most disastrous dystopian future from pursuing net zero?
That we have regular blackouts and energy is extremely expensive. And I can see a realistic scenario for this because if you look at, um, I think the next five years are pretty critical. And the reason they're critical is something that almost nobody's talking about, and that is our gas power stations are getting old. A third of our gas power stations that we rely very heavily on still were built in the 1990s. And I'm doing a piece of work at the moment that you'll have seen from the Peter McCormack, um, podcast there that he's very kindly, um, commissioned.
That it's actually a phenomenally difficult piece of work to do, but all of the, all of the power stations connected to the transmission system publish data about their state and condition. They don't do it in a very user-friendly way. So what I'm doing is I'm going back to 2017 and I'm looking into all of the, they're called remmit notices. It's a market transparency initiative that the EU introduced. And they basically from that I can plot outage information. So over time, have the frequency of their maint, have the frequency of the maintenance outages increased? Have the length of maintenance outages increased? Have the number of unplanned outages increased? And have the number of what we'd call, um, a failed start increased? So when they intended to start up but didn't manage to.
Um, and so it's difficult to do because the data are not presented in a way where you can just go, "Ah, click this and do a nice chart." You've got to do a huge amount of interpretation of the data. But nevertheless, I'm working through this, um, and looking to to so I know that a third of the fleet was built in the 1990s. Most, uh, large gas power stations will last 25, maybe 30 years. So they're pretty much at the end of their lives. I can't really identify any of them that have had the type of upgrade that would extend the life. They've most of them have had upgrades that will make them work in a more efficient way, as in use less gas for the electricity output, but I haven't really seen anything that particularly would extend lives. Now, Peterhead is particularly worrying because that was built in 2000. And Scotland is really dependent on just two power stations, Peterhead and Torness. Now, Torness is a nuclear power station, which we know will definitely, definitely close in the next few years. Now, at the moment, it's March 2030. They might get an extension for one or two years beyond that, but I would be willing to bet money that they won't go past 2032. So that power station is located on the border with England, just near Berwick. Otherwise, the next one is Peterhead. And this one is built in the 19, in, in 2000, coming to end of life. Now they tried to get a refurb contract in the capacity market and didn't get one. But even if they got one, they need new turbines. Right now, it's 7 to 8 years to get a new gas turbine in order to, um, install these turbines. Obviously, they would have to exit the market. But if it's going to be 7 to 8 years, then that will be after Torness has closed. So there will be nothing in Scotland forming the grid, making that wave of current and voltage. The next most northerly power station is Saltend in Hull, which is a huge distance away when it comes to electricity grids. So the Scottish grid is going to stop working. If Peterhead closes, the Scottish grid will not work. And NISO is trying to do all these experiments with synchronous condensers, which are basically electricity generators that don't generate electricity, and fancy electronics and all sorts of things. But nobody has ever formed a grid and maintained a grid of that size in that way, ever, anywhere in the world.
It is a straight-up experiment. And so in five years' time, or or six, seven years' time, people in Scotland might just have no electricity.
And it's not about, is there enough electricity? It's about, will the grid function? Because they might have wind farms busily turning away, but they're outputting a form of electricity that the grid can't use.
It's worrying.
And the grid can't use it unless there's somebody turning the rope. They won't jump in. So, you've been ringing the alarm about this for some time.
Yes. Have you converted many people or the, the people in the, in this, in the sphere, in the industry who have gone, "Bloody hell, Katherine."
Fair, fair point. Um, so I think I have, um, yes, I mean, I have seen some evidence of people looking. And I do have some pretty strong relationships with Ofgem. And I think Ofgem does take some of these concerns seriously. Now, there are some challenges there. And I think one of the big challenges is that NISO itself is highly politicized. And so it used to be part of National Grid.
Then they were worried about conflicts of interest, so they made them split into an arms-length subsidiary that was then called, uh, National Grid Electricity System Operator. So, National Grid ESO. But it was deemed that the conflicts were still too big. And so it was basically brought in to be part of the civil service. The sole shareholder is Ed Milliband as the secretary of state. Now, the conflicts of interest haven't gone away because, um, the senior executives of NISO were until very recently, and may still be, part of the National Grid PLC share scheme. National Grid owns and operates not just the, uh, transmission system, but also the interconnectors. So the power lines that connect us with other countries that are routinely being used instead of our own domestic generation. So that conflict of interest never went away. They prioritize interconnection in their balancing activities, and that benefits them directly. Now, I'm not saying that they, they have some explicit thing internally, but this is a thing that, you know, the conflict of interest that there was that was supposed to go away, didn't go away because they still retained an economic interest in the ownership of all of this stuff. As individuals, the senior management did.
Are they independent of the government?
No, they're not. Now, you look at the Clean Power 2030 advice. The government said, "Right, we want to have clean power in 2030. We want our electricity grid to be net zero in 2030." So they then were like, well, that's not actually realistic. We'll, we'll just say 95% instead of 100%. So they go to NISO and they say, "Right, you need to write a report that says whether this is actually feasible or not."
M—
So NISO writes this report. And it's, everyone calls it independent advice from the system operator. Except freedom of information requests have proved that both Ofgem and DESNZ, the government, signed it off before it was published. And there were detailed content discussions. It wasn't just like, "Oh, that looks okay."
It was—
Yeah. What does this report say? This report says that, yes, we can do clean power 2030, but only if these extremely unlikely criteria are met. For example, we build twice as much grid infrastructure in the, in the next five years that we built in the previous ten.
Okay.
But you listen to Fintan Sly, who's the chief executive of NISO. He says, "We wrote this independent report. It shows it's absolutely possible to do net zero in clean power 2030." And I'm like, "No, you didn't. It wasn't independent, and that's not what the report says." So why are you going around to— and I've heard him say this in person, British Institute of Energy Economics, last year, he said it. I'm like, "Why are you going around saying this? It's not true. It wasn't independent, and it's not actually what you said."
Bloody hell.
But what do people hear? What does the select committee hear? What does the government hear? They're like, "Oh, yeah, independent advice that says it's possible."
It's gone completely out of control now.
It's, it's totally out of hand. So you have, you have an integrity gap where certain individuals are not just telling the truth because you should be out there saying, you know, honestly, it's not possible. And the only levers the government has to pull to even try and make it possible is throwing more money at subsidies. And that's why the most sub, most recent subsidy round, AR7, that happened a couple of months ago, was so expensive. And they've extended the contracts from 15 years to 20 years. This is like pretty much the entire life of a wind farm subsidized from day one till it closes.
And the subsidy, so the subsidy for onshore wind and solar was essentially the same as the cost of generating electricity with gas through the whole of 2025.
The subsidy cost for, uh, offshore wind was significantly higher. And that's just the subsidy element. That's not all the extra connection costs. I was talking about the backup that you have to have when it's not windy and sunny. The, um, the extra balancing because now you've not just got demand changing with weather, you've got generation changing with the weather. And every gust of wind and every, um, cloud coming in front of the sun now has an impact on the grid. It's really interesting. If you look at satellite images in Australia, you can actually match clouds with electrical output. Um, so it, it's, you know, the costs, the full system costs of renewables are really high. They're higher than generating electricity with gas. Even in 2022, when gas prices went insane, highest levels in 30 years, it was still cheaper not to use renewables.
What about, um, things like, is there sort of cutting-edge technology, nuclear, things like that? Have you looked into that?
Well, I have, but so public policy needs to be based on what's real today.
Yeah. Of course, we should hold open the door for innovation and for new developments, but those can take a very long time to deliver. And the example I like to use is this. Okay, my first, okay, I started my job in in financial services. One of my first jobs, I was working in banking and I was doing, um, initial public offerings. So stock market flotations for technology, media, and telecom companies during the dot-com years.
One of the big things people were talking about was mobile pay.
The technology for mobile pay existed in 2000. But it's now a quarter of a century down the line. It's only just becoming mainstream. And more people don't use their mobile phone to buy stuff than do. Now, you probably do, but I don't.
Because I like redundancy. If somebody steals my phone or I lose my phone or it breaks. Yeah. I don't want to not be able to pay for stuff.
I see.
And so, but the tech, but it's, it's taken a quarter of a century for the technology to become mainstream, even if it's not the majority use. So, but it existed in 2000. And everybody was talking about it, everybody in that sector, in that space was talking about it in 2000. So you could come up with a really great technology, and it might come to the market in three or four years, but it might take a quarter of a century. And you don't know. Like, literally, you can't predict it. In 2000, if you'd said it's going to be a quarter of a century and still most people won't use their phone to buy stuff, they'll be like, "No, you're crazy. I don't believe you."
In what way would nuclear energy be a better alternative to fossil fuels?
In every way. So I'm a huge fan of nuclear. We need to. So, nuclear would be cheaper if we didn't self-sabotage when it comes to nuclear. We make it way too expensive because of our regulation. And I'll give you a very simple example of that because people think, "Oh, nuclear is complicated. Cutting back regulation sounds dangerous and sounds undesirable." Our regulators require each new reactor to have a lower worker radiation exposure level than the previous one. Now, that sounds great. You know, continuing improvement. What's not to like?
Except the old advanced gas-cooled reactors that are now coming to the end of their lives and being closed had a lower worker radiation exposure level. So less radiation inside the plant than we are all exposed to when we walk around on the street.
Wow.
So then what is the point of trying to make it lower? It just makes it expensive and complicated to build new reactors, right? So, this is regulation that needs to be changed. Um, so yes, if we stop self-sabotaging with all of these kind of nonsense regulations that don't actually improve anything in the real world, then nuclear would be safer. South Korea has been building their reactors at between five and six billion US dollars each, compared with, I think it's going to be 35 to 40 billion pounds for Hinkley Point. So they've basically built like half a dozen for the same cost. And, and they're building them way quicker. They're building them in 8 to 10 years. So, and nuclear is typically described as base load. So people say it can't operate flexibly. That's not actually true. If it was true, the French grid wouldn't operate because we have quite big variations between how much electricity we use across the day.
Um, in the winter, we can go up to 50 gigawatts in at dinnertime and be at 40 at breakfast time, you know, and in the summer, in the middle of the day, we can be like 20, and in the morning, at lunchtime, when the peak is, it can be 30. So we have these big variations. Now, nuclear power can accommodate that. There's about three pretty reliable ways that you can, um, flex the output of nuclear power stations.
Um, one of them probably is not very desirable, but, you know, you have, you do have a lot more control than people think. The French system benefits from a lot of hydroelectric power, which is very flexible. We don't have very much of that. I know I said we have the biggest, but it's pretty much all we've got. We've got two or three.
Um, so I think that it would probably be cheaper to retain some gas generation, um, for what we call peaking. So to just come on for short periods of time. But you can build an entire electricity system that's almost entirely based on nuclear, and it would be extremely reliable. Nuclear power stations will last 60 years, potentially more with the modern ones. Um, you need to take them offline every couple of years to refuel, but otherwise, that they work very reliably. Um, and if we sort out the regulation, we can cut a huge amount of the difficulty in constructing them in the first place and lower the cost significantly. So, I think, you know, I come across as a big fossil fuel advocate. I'm a massive hydrocarbons advocate. Oil and gas have lifted billions of people out of poverty, and they are the foundation of modern medicine, modern agriculture, and modern technology. And they're going to remain essential within energy for decades. It's very important that we procure and maintain access to hydrocarbons in a secure and cost-effective way, but I would really like to see the electricity system transition to nuclear.
So, do you feel at all optimistic or or entirely negative about the future now?
Um, I think we're going to go through some very hard times before it gets better. And I think unfortunately, and I don't like to be too political about this, but this government doesn't make it easy because they don't have a grasp of how the economy works. The lack of anybody in the front bench with business experience is, I mean, that's a detriment that you cannot get around. They need business people. And, and they won't talk to. I mean, this is the, this is the awful thing. Is they came into government with this idea that they were going to have growth, and then they implement a whole load of policies that do the opposite. And business told them that their policies were anti-growth, and they didn't believe it. They thought the businesses were too self-interested to tell them the truth. So now, of course, the economic data are declining. Inflation's going up, guilt yields are going up, unemployment's going up, youth unemployment is really going up. I mean, they are starting to reconsider the minimum wage, um, because they've been told, and now they're seeing the wider impact of the other employment costs they've increased. They're now maybe thinking, "Oh, maybe they weren't just us that it's going to be, you know, impacting employment. Maybe actually it will impact employment." Um, everything, you know, NHS waiting lists are going up, educational outcomes are falling. It's everything is going the wrong way. And it's, and a lot, a lot of it is because the government just does not understand how the world works. They have a very naive attitude. As soon as the Iran war started, they start on about profiteering fuel companies profiteering. And you're like, well, first of all, there was absolutely no evidence that that was happening. And secondly, more than half of what you pay at the pump is tax. The fuel companies could triple their profits, and you wouldn't really notice because it's overwhelmed by this impact of tax. And it's even worse because you pay VAT on the fuel duty. So some of it is taxed twice. And they're having the gall to stand there saying, "Oh, you know, we think that, um, we, we're really worried about profiteering by the fuel companies." Then they try and haul in all the supermarkets. Supermarkets in this country make an operating profit of between zero and 5%. It's the very bottom of the pile when it comes to sector performance. If you look at the FTSE 100, 2024, the top performer was Rightmove at 78% operating profit. And they've had some trouble since, but, um, I didn't look yet for 2025. In fact, the data probably aren't in yet, but, um, you know, zero to 5%. That's like at the bottom. I think the average for the FTSE was like 7 to 8% in 2024. And your energy suppliers, the price cap limits them to operating profit of 2.5%.
So it's in that supermarket bracket. There is no profiteering going on here. And it's actually quite offensive for the government to start saying that. Your petrol retailers reported an increase in, um, aggression from customers because they were hearing this stuff from the government, like the petrol's got more expensive.
Because oil prices have gone up.
Yeah. And they're immediately thinking, "Oh, you're profiteering. That's why it's gone more expensive." And they're starting to be aggressive with the stuff. So, it's like, you're putting human beings at risk of physical harm. So, this is not neutral stuff.
God. And what, what can people do?
Vote with their feet.
Who do we vote for?
Um, well, so honestly, I think the Conservatives will win the next election.
What?
Um, I know. I know that's probably a niche view at the moment.
There's a few years left, I suppose.
Okay. So that energy policy is now way more sensible. And they're doing the work. So they're actually working out, um, where did they go wrong and how do you fix it? And I know for the first year of opposition, they really didn't say very much. That's because behind the scenes, they were working through these problems. And I talked to Chloe and her team quite a lot. I talked to some of Jeremy's team as well. And they literally went back to first principles. Now, I can't see obviously everything, but I can see on energy and this, if I were choosing how do you approach a problem like this, number one, understand the world as it is. Number two, identify what you would like it to look like. Number three, design policies that get you from one to three, uh, to one to two. Yeah. And then number four, tell people about it.
They're, they're doing that.
Yeah. So I think that's a good thing.
Fair enough.
Um, I think Reform has some of the ideas, but they're not organized enough. And I just wonder whether they're going to have the, um, the operational scale that they would need to be able to form a government.
That remains to be seen. Really interesting though, I guess. I do like bad. I think the Greens have actually poisoned their own well, um, in the recent by-election because I think they largely won it by deceiving the voters about what they really stood for. And I don't think they get to bite twice from that particular cherry.
Well, the only thing I'd say about that is the historical precedent says that that works time and time and time again. Um, it worked. It worked. The Isamo Green kind of alliance.
Okay. But the Greens aren't really Greens anymore.
No. Well, they weren't in Iran or Iraq, Afghanistan, Lebanon.
Yeah. But were they pro-trans in Iran, Iraq, and Lebanon?
That's where that's where it falls.
And, and I think if you, if you look at some of the, um, some of the polling and stuff that where they've been saying to some of the voters in Gorn and Denton, "Do you know what you actually voted for? Do you know that they want to legalize heroin and that they're pro-trans and all these other things?" I think they've been quite shocked. So I think there's a very easy approach there for their opponents in future elections just to make sure that everybody understands exactly the full scope of what the Green Party stands for. And that will be, I think, quite a hard sell because I'm not sure that Islamic voters are going to be all that on board with legalizing heroin and, and the whole trans thing.
Well, it just depends how, if they, what kind of hubris they have because if they feel like, "Well, screw it, because we'll just kill anyone once we get in." That's what happened historically.
Okay. Well, but I don't know that it's, um, I think they've, I think they've created a problem for themselves.
Yeah. I hope so. I hope so.
Well, I definitely hope so as well, because any party that wants to make Zionism defamed as racist.
Yeah.
And, you know, has their activists going door-to-door to identify Jewish households does not belong in government.
No, they're scum. I think they're scum. Um, people, please go follow Katherine. I'll have some links down below. Hit the like button and keep watching this show.