Ryan Hogg

Said it two years ago and time to repeat it again: the #FuelDuty freeze is a massively wrong move on #ClimateCatastrophe, when #Spain has had a YEAR of rain in 8hrs.

‼️EXIT POLL | How Gorton and Denton voted: -- Workers -- 🟢 Green: 49% ➡️ Reform: 28% 🔴 Labour: 21% -- Retired -- ➡️ Reform: 48% 🔴 Labour: 34% 🟢 Green: 13% Poll: @Survation, 27 Feb-8 Mar

Return your unwanted Reform UK flyers to this address and it costs them £2.50 a pop. Pop this address on an envelope with the flyer in, and pop it in a post box! The more we return, the less they will send!

@JosephMackayCh1 @GarethDennis @philatrail @railnigel Doesn't work for oversized loads: UK rail infrastructure is very tight (which is why we have very small trains in terms of cross-section) so large loads simply cannot fit, plus network is so busy the old method of using space on adjacent track would be hugely disruptive & costly.

@rh52d @GarethDennis @philatrail @railnigel Rail transport?

Would be interesting to know the truth on this with regards indirect costs being added to #HS2 for escorting large and heavy lorries. @GarethDennis @philatrail @railnigel

Trump spent months calling NATO obsolete. Threatening Canada with the 51st state. Slapping tariffs on allies. Demanding Europe pay up or lose protection. Insulting world leaders to their faces. Abandoning Ukraine. Calling Germany weak and France irrelevant. Now he needs them. France: no. Germany: no. Norway: no. Canada: never. Japan: officially no. Switzerland: airspace closed. You don’t spend a year burning every bridge and then call for backup when the building is on fire. $21 billion spent. 14 Americans dead. Oil at $102. The Strait mined. Taiwan surrounded. Baghdad evacuated. NATO threatened with a “very bad future.” The allies didn’t abandon America. America spent a year telling them to leave. They listened. Never stop connecting the dots.

BREAKING: Everyone is watching the Strait of Hormuz for oil and fertilizer. Almost nobody has noticed that it is also shutting down MRI machines, semiconductor fabs, and the global aerospace supply chain. Helium. The second lightest element in the universe. No substitute exists for it. You cannot synthesize it. You cannot replace it. And roughly one-third of the world’s supply just went offline. Qatar produces 30 to 33 percent of global helium as a byproduct of LNG processing at Ras Laffan, home to the largest helium production facilities on Earth. When the Hormuz blockade triggered LNG force majeure declarations and attacks hit Qatari infrastructure, the helium stopped flowing with it. Prices have doubled in spot markets. And helium has a property that makes this crisis structurally different from oil, fertilizer, or any other commodity caught behind the strait. It evaporates. Continuously. Even in sealed containers, helium boils off. The global supply chain operates on roughly 45 days of buffer before existing inventory simply ceases to exist. You cannot stockpile helium the way you stockpile crude oil in salt caverns or grain in silos. If the supply stops for six weeks, the buffer is gone. Not depleted. Gone. Returned to the atmosphere where it is too diffuse to economically recapture. This is why the industries that depend on helium are facing a crisis that no financial instrument can solve. Semiconductor manufacturing requires ultra-pure helium for wafer cooling in lithography and for leak detection in sub-5-nanometre chip fabrication. TSMC, Samsung, and Intel cannot produce advanced processors without it. Every AI chip, every smartphone processor, every data centre GPU in the current generation traces its manufacturing lineage through a helium-cooled process. If fabs run dry, the production lines stop. Not slow. Stop. MRI machines require liquid helium to cool superconducting magnets to near absolute zero. Hospitals cannot substitute another gas. When helium supply tightens, MRI availability falls. During previous shortages, hospitals rationed scans. A sustained one-third supply cut puts diagnostic imaging capacity at risk across every healthcare system that depends on magnetic resonance. Aerospace depends on helium for purging rocket fuel systems, pressurising tanks, and testing for leaks in systems where failure means explosion. NASA, SpaceX, ULA, and every launch provider in the Western world runs on helium. Fibre optic cable manufacturing requires helium atmospheres. Quantum computing research requires helium-3 isotopes for cryogenic cooling. The US is the world’s largest helium producer and has some buffer capacity. Algeria and Russia produce meaningful volumes. Overland rerouting from Qatar through Oman and Saudi Arabia is theoretically possible but logistically slow and capacity-limited. None of these alternatives can replace one-third of global supply within the 45-day evaporation window that defines the crisis timeline. The same 21-mile strait that is starving the food system is now threatening the technological infrastructure of modern civilization. The fertilizer trapped behind Hormuz determines whether four billion people eat. The helium trapped behind Hormuz determines whether the chips powering the AI revolution get manufactured, whether cancer patients receive diagnostic scans, and whether rockets carrying communications satellites reach orbit. One chokepoint. Two invisible supply chains. Both irreplaceable. Both operating on biological or physical deadlines that no ceasefire retroactively extends. The world built petroleum reserves. It never built fertilizer reserves. It never built helium reserves either. The pattern keeps repeating. The lesson keeps being ignored. Full analysis: open.substack.com/pub/shanakaans…

Interesting that car parking demand is actually falling. An opportunity for an @Railnatter? ft.com/content/2e809a…

The critical crossover. From 10% to 30% in just a decade. In 2025 wind & solar generated more electricity in the EU than fossil fuels. Once a new technology overtakes the incumbent, the direction of travel becomes obvious. Cost curves + deployment = disruption.⚡#Bettrification

When wind is as low as 3GW the Tufton Street shills and Andrew Neil nearly have a stroke and think the lights are about to go out. The Gas fleet at 3GW and Nuclear at 2.9GW and its tumble weed (Note that useless solar more than double Nuclear at 10am on a March day)

More railways, less highways

Warning. There is a high chance of Reform UK MPs on the island today, including Farage himself. Here are some question ideas if you happen to see him: 1) why did he hide money in an offshore bank account, does he not think he should pay his fair share? 2) why does he need 5 houses? 3) who actually bought his Clacton House? 4) why does Farage skip two thirds of parliamentary votes? 5) how can he fit in the 1,100 extra hours he does for his 10 other jobs and still fulfill his MP duties? 6) why did he never apologise to the 30+ allegations of bullying racism and anti-semitism from school? 7) why did he attend Davos at the behest of a foreign billionaire? 8) why did he break the ministerial code 17 times by not declaring income? 9) how does it feel to be the best paid MP through second jobs, earning over £1 million per year? 10) Why did you not think it was a bad thing that your treasurer and party donor Nick Candy was implicated in the Epstein Files and was friends with pedophiles?

It’s really really bad. This video is a few years out of date. Some scientists believe we’ll now hit 2C within the next 15 years.

Lots of North Sea propaganda out there today. Here’s the facts: 🛢️ *We* don’t have any reserves. They were privatised in the 80s, unlike Norway’s, which are publicly owned. 🛢️ North Sea production peaked in 1999. 🛢️ Production will fall by 95% by 2050, even with new licences.

Yeah so the Elizabeth Line moves this many people every 45 minutes at rush hour 😭

An immigrant stepped in to help during a fire in Glasgow. #Glasgow, give him his flowers.

Glasgow Central will remain closed at least into Tuesday, while @fire_scot work to contain the fire on Union Street and make the area safe. Once that’s complete, our team need to inspect the station itself for any damage. As soon as we can share more news on timescales, we will.

Freezing rail fares and potentially unfreezing fuel duty. Are we finally turning the tanker in the right direction or are we just seeing a stopped clock at the right time?

The insurance details need to be checked on the building that caught fire and completely collapsed in Glasgow. An unfortunate fire or something more sinister? Fire safety on all buildings in Glasgow needs to be commissioned! A building that survived two world wars, falls by a small fire started in the Vape shop under it! Union street fire , Glasgow. Looks like a missile struck it.

A few days ago, British commentators who believe in nothing were asking why @ZackPolanski was spending more time talking about Middle Eastern wars than the environment…

In 2025, solar and wind produced more electricity than fossil fuels in the European Union. (Our World in Data)