edward price

@MLiebreich Is there not a case for using hydrogen production for grid balancing using renewable peaks.?

Think hydrogen is the solution to energy security in Europe? You would need to believe the price of natural gas *is going up 5x* and *staying there for 15 years*. It would be like buying a fleet of snowploughs in Riyadh in case it snows, except at a cost of trillions of Euros!

@aSamEvans Single minded destruction of these vastly expensive structures driven for reasons of property gain. Improving the view. Bearing in mind these sites already had all the infrastructure connections to the grid.

Ah, that’s given them energy protection. We could do this Narrators voice …. You can’t? ?? Well, they blew ours up rather than mothball and Awesome Ed also filled all the shale points in with concrete!!

@LeftHandDagger @SamaHoole The cattle are displaced because the grasslands are ploughed up for Soya production. The byproducts are used as a valuable livestock feed, but the primary product is the soy oil.

@SamaHoole The Amazon rainforest is cleared for cattle, which makes way for other industries like soy. Most of the soy, I think about 80 percent goes to feed cattle. Also, eating legumes is not killing millions of people annually like flesh foods.

The soy industry kills the Amazon. This needs saying plainly, because somehow it has been filed under "environmental problems with meat" when soy is the thing doing it. Brazil is the world's largest soy producer. Between 2001 and 2020, soy expansion drove the loss of millions of hectares of Cerrado and Amazon forest. This soy, and here is where the story performs a disappearing act, is overwhelmingly used to produce soybean oil, with the defatted meal then sold as animal feed. The oil is the product. The chickens get the leftovers. The deforestation is happening to make the cooking oil in your shop-bought hummus. Glyphosate use on soy is among the highest of any agricultural commodity on Earth. Then the nutrition. Soy contains phytoestrogens, isoflavones, that structurally resemble oestrogen and bind to oestrogen receptors. Whether this matters at normal consumption levels is contested. What isn't contested: the cumulative exposure across soy protein isolate in protein bars, meat alternatives, infant formula, and oat milk is not being tracked by anyone. Soy also contains phytic acid, lectins, and trypsin inhibitors. Traditional fermented preparations: miso, tempeh, natto, break these down substantially. Soy protein isolate, ultra-processed and added to half the products in the wellness aisle, does not. The protein content is real. The amino acid profile is reasonable for a plant. These facts exist. But a product that cleared the Amazon, is littered with defensive toxins, runs on glyphosate, and arrives in your protein bar as a hexane-extracted isolate has somehow become the healthy and environmentally ethical choice. At least the cow ate grass.

@TrooperSnooks If the phone belongs to a senior government advisor and mysteriously goes missing doesn’t that then become a serious concern for national security? Presumably significant resources were deployed to look for it since it might fall into enemy hands.

Book pitch: The Case of the Missing Mobile A beleaguered Prime Minister clings on to his tenuous power thanks to a missing mobile phone. Will craggy ex Met copper, private detective and have- a-go hero Kami Bedenrock find it before the forces of darkness?

@LBC @lewis_goodall Have we ever had defences here that were capable of preventing any and all attacks on our country? Such attacks might be launched from all sorts of place so could never be excluded.

‘People will conclude from your lack of answer that they can hit us…’ @Lewis_Goodall presses Labour’s Steve Reed on the likelihood of an Iranian missile attack on British soil.

@nxt888 You can’t kill the morale of the people, but you can diminish the physical strength of the regime.

@nxt888 In Vietnam their objective was to maintain an unpopular and largely corrupt regime in power. In Iran they’re on the other side. Containing its outreach, diminishing its capacity to impose authority and creating space for internal Opposition.

Operation Rolling Thunder. From 1965 to 1968, the United States conducted a sustained bombing campaign against North Vietnam. The goal was to break the will of the North Vietnamese government and people. To make the cost of continuing the war too high to bear. They dropped 864,000 tons of bombs. The will was not broken. So they escalated. Operation Linebacker. Operation Linebacker II, the Christmas Bombings of 1972: twelve days of around-the-clock bombing of Hanoi and Haiphong, described by some U.S. generals as trying to "bomb them back to the Stone Age." Hospitals were hit. Residential areas were hit. Bạch Mai Hospital, the largest hospital in North Vietnam, was hit repeatedly. After the Christmas Bombings, the North Vietnamese negotiating position at the Paris Peace talks did not weaken. It strengthened. They bombed us into refusing to surrender. Every bomb that fell on a hospital, every family killed in their home, every village erased from the map created ten more people who would die before they accepted foreign domination. This is what American strategists, with all their degrees and all their think tanks and all their war games, failed to understand about the people they were trying to break. You cannot bomb dignity out of people who have decided they would rather die than give it up.

@Rosewood_Farm @TWBFarms We were finally getting some financial recognition for the sort of mixed farming which heavily contributed to the iconic landscape of lowland England which the public adore, but which had recently received very little direct financial incentive.

@EdwdPrice @TWBFarms Not sure about that as cheaper clover leys are available, herbal is more about soil health, and without better actions for all types of permanent grass it undermines biodiversity & wetland restoration.

It took a war in Iran for Labour to realise they shut down domestic nitrogen production. Farmers are applying fertiliser now, not in 8 weeks. Only immediate, urgent action by the government will change how much food we have 12 months from now. #FoodSecurity #FarmingCrisis #UKAgriculture #NetZero #LabourFail #FoodSecurityIsNationalSecurity gov.uk/government/new…

@wetoldyouson @JamesMelville They’re not just intelligent, we probably trained half of them.

@wetoldyouson @JamesMelville 40 years ago wandering around the basement at Imperial College and seeing the Iranian students in the aerospace section, thinking that seems a bit strange.

Sean Bell (retired RAF fighter pilot, air vice marshall & military analyst): “The British government and certainly my understanding, the British military want to keep well clear of getting directly involved in this conflict. Because as we are seeing, it’s not a winnable war.”

@GBPolitcs In better news the triple lock critics needn’t worry about the 2.5% automatic uplift because it’s unlikely to apply for some time.

🚨NEW: The IFS has warned that the Middle East energy crisis has left Rachel Reeves with a shortfall of £20bn in her spending plans

@TrooperSnooks @countrymousie @ChrisGPackham On the bright side it’s a good thing that the land in Herefordshire has been deliberately deprived of nutrients so that the builders can put more sewage in the river. After all nutrients have no value when they can just be imported for nothing and people need to eat less.

@EdwdPrice @countrymousie @ChrisGPackham Amen...what good news that would be for hedgelayers. Mind you, with more sheep that would mean more hedgerows, more biodiversity, more carbon storage. That can't be right, we are told sheep are the bad guys...and cows natch. I am so confused

Food prices likely to rise due to Iran war, farmers' union says . . . of course it does , as it’s nitrogen pumping , pesticide dumping paymasters profit from fossil fuel dependency to drive the industrial agriculture which is killing our home . . . bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…

@TrooperSnooks @countrymousie @ChrisGPackham Bring back the sheep!

@countrymousie @ChrisGPackham Yes, yes, but let's not let agronomy and basic biology get in the way of a good virtue signal.

@ChrisGPackham Food produced in industrial factories would have even greater energy requirements. Then again one of the lowest input mechanisms of food production is upland sheep grazing!

@croftfootfarm Yes, I know Iran is still fighting, but not long ago the idea of the country even being attacked would have been unthinkable.

@croftfootfarm Well the collapse of the Syrian, Venezuelan and now Iranian regimes is a direct result of Russia having weakened its own strategic importance through the Ukraine war.

Other than UK what is this long list of major economies who are still complying with the ideological concept of Net Zero? Russia? United States? China? Middle East? (Given the Franco German willingness to fiddle emissions are they even playing?)

@croftfootfarm I don’t think there’s a single politician on the planet, other than Putin, whose reputation has been so tarnished by time as Ms Merkel.

@EdwdPrice Germany is and they are wrecked but without our debt levels yet , France has doubled down on nuclear - probably the ultimate solution but big question - do we want every country in the world going nuclear ? Probably not !

@TWBFarms Long term, but they should immediately reverse the cut to the payment for herbal and clover leys under new SFI agreements which now undermines the move to lower nitrogen use on grassland.

This approach perfectly demonstrates what’s wrong, politicians with no grasp of farming. An 8-week consultation means we miss the 2026 fertiliser window. By the time conclusions come, the year’s lost. We need people who understand the industry making decisions, not MPs like Angela Eagle and Steve Reed, with no farming knowledge whatsoever.

@loosecollie @LizWebsterSBF I don’t think we do know where we are. In fact I think the government position is horrendously confusing. Do we want Diego Garcia or not? Only if we don’t want it why are we telling the US what they can or can’t do with it?

@LizWebsterSBF We know where we are, it's where we go that matters....

✅ Max Hastings is bang on. The Iran war is reckless, irrational, and not in Britain’s interest. The UK should stay out, even if the US is involved. Supporting it risks dragging Britain into a long, unwinnable conflict. Air strikes won’t solve Iran. You can’t bomb your way to stability. Escalation leads to deeper involvement. That directly challenges the current narrative of “limited”, “targeted”, “defensive”.

@BladeoftheS Don’t forget Iran has been attacking Israel via proxies for many years. They crossed the rubicon of direct missile attacks some time ago. It’s just that the defences largely worked. The big change now is that they are targeting other Arab countries.

@BladeoftheS So why has Iran found it so difficult to understand that?

Tony Benn's "Don't arab women weep when their children die, doesn't bombing strengthen their resolve?" Is as relevant now as it was 25 years ago.