Sando King

Conventional thinking treats wind and solar as permanent infrastructure. They aren't. These are a form of short life-cycle, industrial gadgetry with roughly 15-to-25-year lifespans. They are all in various stages of permanent decay and replacement - hydrocarbon and nuclear plants last generations. We see this in the mounting graveyards of unsalvageable wreckage. Yes, much of it can be recycled in theory. But in reality, the economic and energy costs usually outweigh the benefits. They are now decomposing faster than we can replace them and this is the Treadmill Effect. If a nation installs 5 GW of wind power every year, by Year 20, they aren't expanding the grid anymore. They are being forced to build 5 GW just to replace the rusted, fatigued and degraded turbines built in Year 1. Growth flatlines, swallowed up in pure maintenance. Look at the scale of this dilemma: despite millions of massive turbines and solar arrays deployed over 40 years, hydrocarbon fuels still dominate at roughly 81% of global primary energy. Solar and wind deliver only a tiny fraction of total primary energy. We've reached the limit. Almost every turbine and panel built over the last two decades is now in the late stages of decomposition. We're struggling just to keep up; and soon we will fall behind. The mines will become hollowed-out and these 'green' rust collectors will fall apart where they stand. To feed this replacement treadmill will need an astronomical volume of minerals: like copper, nickel, cobalt and rare earths. But we have already devoured the high-grade ores. A century ago, copper ore was 5% metal. Today, major mines are crushing ore that is less than 0.5% copper. To get the same tonne of metal, you must blast, haul and crush ten times more rock. This requires more massive, diesel-guzzling mining fleets and heavy industrial smelting. We are cannibalising dense, reliable fossil energy just to chase low-density, short-lived weather collectors. Here is the Einsteinian paradox. In physics, the closer an object gets to the speed of light, the more massive it becomes, requiring exponentially more energy to move it a fraction further. The energy transition is its own relativistic wall. The closer a grid gets to 100% renewable penetration, the greater its structural costs will become. You don't just need more panels; you need a parallel universe of over-building, synchronous condensers, and continent-spanning transmission lines just to handle the asynchronous volatility. We are hitting that Inversion Point. The fossil fuel energy required to mine the rare earths, manufacture the turbines and endlessly replace the dying infrastructure will eventually outpace the net energy the system delivers. You cannot reach the limit of light. Albert Einstein - the ultimate observer of universal limits - would smile at the irony. Net Zero is being driven by an ideological bureaucracy that reads financial blueprints but ignores the periodic table and the laws of thermodynamics. Entropy is universal. Nothing can bypass it. Imagery of rust, mechanical exhaustion and the accumulation of unmanaged composite materials.

Strange response. Wealth taxes are a sensible policy for a tax base with extreme wealth + low taxable incomes. How would you tax them otherwise, Jessica? Also, Norway's wealth tax is collecting more and more revenue every year. How is that an unworkable gimmick?

HS2 was a brilliant idea for £10bn, and is a terrible one for £100bn. That’s why getting costs down is the most important thing for Britain to do if it wants infrastructure abundance.

I’ve always disliked how in the UK , your direction in life is determined seriously before 18

there was an entire section of the federalist papers about how making politicians live like paupers is how you get your government sold out to business interests constantly, when they discussed the common failure models of republican government