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I am a big fan of energy. One of my favourite articles of recent years was Matt Yglesias’s piece on the case for energy abundance: that we shouldn’t just be treating renewables as a way of replacing fossil fuel energy capacity, but that we should see it as a way to massively exceed our current capacity. We should generate far, far more energy that we are currently doing, because doing so improves everything else.

For instance: energy costs limit your industrial output. If you’re in the US, you can get energy for less than ten cents per kilowatt-hour (kWh), in many states. If you’re in Jamaica, it’s nearly 40 cents. As Yglesias points out in another post on the topic of energy abundance, this is probably why Jamaica, despite having lots of raw materials in the form of bauxite, an aluminium ore, doesn’t have a smelting industry – because it just costs too much to heat the ore.

Agriculture is basically 100 per cent reliant on energy, too. Something like 50 per cent of the calories in most food comes from fertiliser: it is not overstating the case to say that if we removed all the fertiliser from the world tomorrow, most of us would starve to death within two years. Fertiliser is made by taking nitrogen from the air and hydrogen from natural gas, to create ammonia, which fixes nitrogen into our soils. It takes huge amounts of energy to produce. It could be made without natural gas, using hydrogen from water, but that would take even more energy. Obviously it is good to be able to feed people, so we want lots more energy.

Plus many of us enjoy heating our homes or using air conditioners or travelling to see loved ones, and those things need energy. It’s good to be able to do them! But we need to be able to do them at a lower carbon cost.

(Light is basically free now. LED bulbs are an irrelevance, energy-wise; you can leave an LED light on for an hour for the carbon cost of using your boiler for three seconds.)

The point is: we need to stop being cheems about energy. We should develop an abundance mindset. Build everything we can build – solar, wind, nuclear, tidal. Vast solar farms in the Sahara Desert connected to Spain by gigantic undersea cables. Get DeepMind to solve the fusion problem. Energy. Build it! Build the energy.

I was a bit surprised to learn, then, of a wrinkle in how UK energy planning permission actually works. The Planning Inspectorate is the body that deals with planning appeals. And in several recent appeals for permission to build energy plants, it has recommended imposing maximum output capacity limits.

For instance, in the buildup to the recent approval of the Little Crow Solar Park in Lincolnshire, the Inspectorate suggested that the park should be limited to 300 megawatts of output.

To make it clear why that’s silly: the environmental impact of a solar farm, or any energy source, isn’t (directly) to do with its output. Solar technology in particular is improving at an absolutely insane rate. In 10 years’ time, you could probably get much more energy from the same area of land, without having any more impact on the area.

What limiting the output means is that, when technology improves, the people running the farm can’t just replace the solar panels and up their output; they have to go through the whole planning process again. The cost of the planning process is enormous – someone told me that it can be a third of the total cost of building the plant. So imposing output limits would directly disincentivise replacing old solar or wind tech with new, more efficient ones.

Luckily the company building the solar panels objected, on exactly the grounds I mentioned above, and so did the Secretary of State, and the examining authority changed their minds, so it looked like it was going ahead with no limits. But the final decision letter, apparently out of nowhere, included a line saying that the battery capacity for the plant would be “up to 90MW”. Which is exactly as stupid! Battery tech is also advancing at an amazing rate (thank you, Elon Musk!), and you’ll be wanting to replace your batteries in a few years to install better ones. But if they’re capable of storing more than 90MW, they’ll have to go through the whole exhausting planning process again!

All of this would be merely annoying if it were only the one solar farm. But it appears to be a theme. The Drax biomass generator, for instance. Now, I personally suspect biomass is a bit of a con and we shouldn’t be focusing on it (probably one for a different post, though). But nonetheless, it goes through the same planning process, and the same “if the tech improves you can boost output with less impact” considerations apply. So it’s a bit concerning to see in the Planning Inspectorate’s notes on its application that they ask why the output is described as “over” rather than “up to” some figure, because which might “indicate that there is no upper limit” and thus breach earlier permissions.

And the West Burton C gas-fired plant was given planning permission for “up to” 299MW, so if someone comes up with a way of using the gas more efficiently to make more energy for less carbon emissions, they won’t be able to do it. The South Humber refuse-burning plant had the same issue, up to 99MW. By all means say “no more than 100 tonnes of carbon per hour” or whatever, but this is really stupid.

No doubt there are lots more examples like this: I was tipped off to it by an acquaintance with a knowledge of the energy system. I just went and had a look myself at a Planning Inspectorate decision letter for a randomly selected offshore wind farm – the Burbo Bank installation off the Wirral – and, lo and behold, it’s licensed for “up to 259MW” of generation. This is really stupid and bad! We’re literally just making it harder for ourselves to make simple, straightforward improvements!

But while it’s really dumb, it’s at least easily fixed. All energy planning permission documents should say “over” rather than “up to”. Require minimum standards of energy production for a given environmental impact, rather than imposing a maximum. Energy is good! We want more of it! People being able to heat homes, countries being able to smelt aluminium, farmers being able to feed the world – these are good things. Stop getting in the way of it. Anyway, rant over.

In which I am somewhat positive about the UK’s health regulatory system, for (fairly) rapidly approving and recommending the new bivalent Covid vaccine.

And in which I am rather more negative about the UK’s health regulatory system, for approving the Evusheld monoclonal antibody for Covid six months ago and then not deciding not to procure it.

(I suspect pedants will tell me off for saying the Evusheld thing is to do with the regulatory system, because actually it’s the Department of Health saying they want to wait until the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence… oh god I’m already bored. They should have bought some of the drug ahead of the NICE decision but they haven’t, that’s about it really.)

A lot of “free speech: is it good actually?” chat this week, what with (on the comic end of the scale) the astonishingly offensive comic Jerry Sadowitz having his show at the Edinburgh Fringe cancelled after one night, the venue apparently being shocked that booking a show by an astonishingly offensive comic will lead to an astonishingly offensive comic show; and (on the tragic end of the scale) the stabbing of Salman Rushdie live on stage.

The trouble with any discussion of free speech is that it ends up with some smartarses going 1) “Ah but no one believes in ABSOLUTE free speech, if someone said ‘kill Tom Chivers now’ you’d want that banned;” 2) “Free speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences;” and 3) “The First Amendment only covers [whatever]” or “The UK doesn’t have a First Amendment so banning [whatever] doesn’t count as limiting free speech.”

They’re all deeply annoying points. First, yes, we do mostly agree that libel, incitement to violence, and death threats should have some legal limits. But I hope most of us would agree also that you don’t want the police arresting people because their “social media post caused anxiety”. We can agree that there should be limits on free speech, while also agreeing that they should be way fewer limits than there currently are.

And free speech should mean freedom from consequences, to some degree. People shouldn’t be worried that they’ll lose their jobs – or get stabbed on stage – over offensive but legal speech. What’s more, conflating the legal right to free speech with the moral right is really stupid, and implies that whatever the laws are in any given country correctly delineate what speech should be allowed. Legal limits on speech are still limits on speech. Maybe those limits are good and valuable! But don’t pretend they don’t exist.

Anyway, that’s just me ranting a bit, but the most thoughtful blogger I’ve read on this stuff is (of course) Scott Alexander. He’s done quite a few posts on the subject, but probably the central one is 2013’s “The Spirit of the First Amendment”:

A good response to an argument is one that addresses an idea; a bad argument is one that silences it. If you try to address an idea, your success depends on how good the idea is; if you try to silence it, your success depends on how powerful you are and how many pitchforks and torches you can provide on short notice.

Shooting bullets is a good way to silence an idea without addressing it. So is firing stones from catapults, or slicing people open with swords, or gathering a pitchfork-wielding mob.

But trying to get someone fired for holding an idea is also a way of silencing an idea without addressing it. I’m sick of talking about Phil Robertson, so let’s talk about the Alabama woman who was fired for having a Kerry-Edwards bumper sticker on her car (her boss supported Bush). Could be an easy way to quiet support for a candidate you don’t like. Oh, there are more Bush voters than Kerry voters in this county? Let’s bombard her workplace with letters until they fire her! Now she’s broke and has to sit at home trying to scrape money together to afford food and ruing the day she ever dared to challenge our prejudices! And the next person to disagree with the rest of us will think twice before opening their mouth!

See also his “Is it possible to have coherent principles around free speech norms?”, which discusses the inherent contradictions – am I free to tell you to shut up? Is that me exercising my free speech, or me limiting yours? Anyway. Read them, they’re a lot more informative than the usual “Ah, you say you believe in free speech, and yet you would rather not be called a child molester on the internet? Curious! I am very intelligent” discourse you usually get.

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