Adam Bell
@adambell.bsky.social
3.3K followers 560 following 1.4K posts
Director of Policy at Stonehaven. Ex BEIS. Energy geek. All skeets in a personal capacity. @adam_grant_bell on the bird site
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adambell.bsky.social
I would genuinely love to see an interviewer properly take her to task on her apparent about-face from the choices she made herself in office to what she's doing now.
adambell.bsky.social
The thing that gets me is that they were in charge for almost the whole time the Act has been in force, and only now is it an issue. If they were going, "From our experience in Govt we know that the CCA is inadequate in X way for Y reasons," that would be a good debate!
adambell.bsky.social
I'm doing some thinking about how you could improve the prospects for heat decarbonisation to be as enduring as electricity and road travel, centring the consumer as much as possible. More soon... /fin
adambell.bsky.social
The areas where progress would slow are heat decarbonisation, where the consumer case for heat pumps is not straight forward, and on industry and air travel. /6
adambell.bsky.social
The direction of travel on surface transport is clear: electrification. Electric cars are better to drive and cheaper to run. Consumers will eventually switch to them en masse. /5
adambell.bsky.social
Electricity would be largely decarbonised, albeit possibly with about 10-15% of gas by volume. Wind and solar are now forever; they are cheap enough to be deployed without support, and AR7 will buy enough to ensure they are a feature of the system for decades. /4
adambell.bsky.social
However, it is worth noting what would happen if the Conservatives did indeed repeal the CCA once they got into office and then made no further interventions in climate policy. /3
adambell.bsky.social
If they think our climate policy is Stalinist then they must embrace their new identity as tiny Stalins. /2
adambell.bsky.social
This is really good. Nothing about the CCA has obliged the Government to go down the centrally planning route the Conservatives now decry. Moreover, the Conservatives were in office for all but two of the first 17 years of the CCA. /1
drsimevans.carbonbrief.org
FACTCHECK: What the Climate Change Act actually means for the UK – and what is a load of old nonsense

Really enjoyed putting this together with colleagues, inc learning new things about the fascinating backstory to the Act

Feat. OG authors of the Act & more

www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-wh...
adambell.bsky.social
I lived in Newham until about a year ago. It is simultaneously one of the youngest and the poorest boroughs in London. Just compare the council tax revenue between it and, say, Wandsworth. Without this funding, tens of thousands of children will find their lives harder than they otherwise would.
adambell.bsky.social
Unless she thinks she'll become a deity if she believes in herself really hard, of course.
adambell.bsky.social
This is the maddest thing I have read today. How you could read Small Gods and have the same kind of misplaced self-belief as Badenoch is beyond me.
paulhaine.bsky.social
Kemi Badenoch claiming Terry Pratchett as her favourite author is wild
adambell.bsky.social
Am very much enjoying the reports from the Margaret Thatcher Cosplay Convention.
stephenkb.bsky.social
A party conference where Margaret Thatcher's clothes are on display, but where no-one seems to have realised that none of them could write or deliver anything like her speeches in terms of depth of policy engagement and thought:
Speech to Conservative Party Conference | Margaret Thatcher Foundation
www.margaretthatcher.org
adambell.bsky.social
Ah - in that case I think the right thing to do is apply prices when consumers can actually make choices. We have a paper coming out soon looking at whether we should front-load carbon costs onto boilers rather than onto gas.
adambell.bsky.social
There are choices about how we pay for all these things of course. I think the interesting question is how you demonstrate public upside for any decarbonisation policy. Certainly, we have failed to capture much of the supply chain for our technology choices.
Reposted by Adam Bell
james-bg.bsky.social
It's a minor thing, but this is how the Conservative press release announcing plans to repeal the Climate Change Act starts.

'...as revealed by The Spectator'.

You are meant to be His Majesty's Opposition, not the worst kind of politics blogger.
adambell.bsky.social
This is a tragedy, but very much a symptom of their decline. If they are indeed wiped out at the next election, caught between the populism they unleashed through the appalling governance of the 2010s and parties still in favour of reason, they will absolutely deserve it. /fin
adambell.bsky.social
The references in their press release to organisations that have overtly sought to prevent climate action make clear that they no longer feel allegiance to facts, that they are no longer a science-based party. /3
adambell.bsky.social
This is not a function of the Act itself, rather its implementation, about which we do need a debate. But this is not the debate that the Conservatives seem to want to prompt. /2
adambell.bsky.social
The Climate Change Act has led to a regime in which Government finds itself compelled to make short-run technological choices that may or may not pay off, and to do so via policies that are chock full of unintended consequences. I have written about this before. /1
What's wrong with the Climate Change Act?
Or, how the real Deep State holds back decarbonisation and growth by accident.
unbalancingmechanism.substack.com
adambell.bsky.social
This implies that politicians could win your good will by opening with, "What up, conf?"
adambell.bsky.social
It remains better than streamers addressing, "Chat," as a gestalt entity.
Reposted by Adam Bell
ozkaterji.bsky.social
While today he presents himself as the defender of Palestinians under Israeli bombardment, the Russian intervention in Syria was supported by Labour’s former leader Jeremy Corbyn, and his director of communications Seamus Milne.

This is why Syrians continue to despise him.
bsky.app/profile/ozka...
ozkaterji.bsky.social
On this day 10 years ago, Russia entered the Syrian civil war on behalf of the Assad regime, devastating infrastructure, displacing millions and murdering thousands of Syrian civilians.

Despite all of these widespread crimes, Moscow and Assad would go on to lose.
adambell.bsky.social
Charitably, they could mean mixing plutonium with uranium as part of a broader fuel cycle, but I bet they don't.
adambell.bsky.social
This is the sort of thing that falls apart as soon as you think about it for a second. The Americans are welcome to try tossing near weapons-grade plutonium into a nuclear reactor designed for low enriched uranium, but ideally do it away from populated areas.