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Ed Conway Profile picture
Ed Conway
@EdConwaySky
Did I mention I wrote a book?
27 subscribers
Dec 14 • 30 tweets • 9 min read
🚜FARMAGEDDON🌾
The story of what's REALLY going on in farming. A story far more complex than the conventional wisdom.
This isn't just (or even mainly) about inheritance tax. It's about a cascade of challenges & crises that may ultimately threaten food security.
📽️5 min primer👇 Let's begin with that big, overarching issue: food security.
For most of the past century, farmers have been encouraged to grow as much food as possible. The story here goes back to WWII and its aftermath, when the conventional wisdom was the UK needed to be more self sufficient Image
Dec 6 • 17 tweets • 6 min read
🚗What's happening to Europe's car industry is one of the biggest stories in the world right now, & prob the biggest story of next year too.
A slow motion implosion driven by multiple factors (esp Chinese competition).
Watch my primer on what's going on👇
What makes this moment so dangerous, so destructive for legacy carmakers, is that this is a perfect storm. Three main issues:
1. The shift from conventional engines to batteries is a DISRUPTIVE innovation. The kind of thing Clay Christensen wrote about.
This is a MASSIVE deal...
Nov 28 • 12 tweets • 4 min read
Today we learnt the no of people flowing into the UK hit an all-time high last yr: an influx we've NEVER seen before either as a total or as a share of the population.
So... why is the @ONS (and some news organisations) reporting this as a FALL in migration?!
Let's dig deeper
🧵 The ONS publishes immigration figures every six months. There's a lot of data, with plenty of provisos all over it.
But as is often the case the story gets simplified in the telling.
Consider the story the last time the data came out. This is how the chart looked 👇 Image
Nov 19 • 14 tweets • 6 min read
🧵SALT🧵
It's been snowing in the UK and the road gritters are out in force, begging the question:
Have you ever wondered where that grit actually COMES from?
The answer is more magical, beautiful and fascinating than you probably realised.
1/14 Image Because that dirty-looking salt being spread by trucks on our roads is actually the remains of an ancient ocean (actually two ancient oceans), buried deep beneath our feet.
Most of the stuff being spread in London comes from a single mine in Cheshire - at Winsford.
2/14 Image
Oct 31 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
🧵How worried should we (and @RachelReevesMP) be about the slightly nervy reaction from financial markets towards her first Budget?
Short answer: certainly a bit worried.
But perhaps not for the reasons you might expect... Worth saying at the outset: these markets are volatile.
Trying to interpret movements in govt bonds is v tricky.
They're moved by all sorts of factors - fiscal, monetary, economic and structural - from all over the world.
So yesterday's Budget is only one of many factors here...
Oct 8 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
🚨Latest UK population numbers just landed.
Two headlines:
- The UK natural population (eg domestic births minus deaths) is now FALLING - at the fastest rate in modern history.
- Yet OVERALL population is rising at the fastest rate since 1948 🤯
How? Lemme explain...
🧵 Nearly every year since records began a century and a bit ago, more people in the UK were born than died.
In the year to 2023, that changed.
664k births. 681k deaths.
The net drop of 16k is the biggest on record (also in % terms).
It's a watershed moment for UK demographics. Image
Sep 24 • 32 tweets • 12 min read
🚨This is the story of how UK & EU goods are STILL going into Russia in vast quantities, despite sanctions.
Of how the economic war waged by the G7 is failing.
Of how I witnessed sanctions rules broken in plain sight.
But above all else it’s the story of a chart... 🧵 Here’s the chart in question. It shows you UK car exports to Russia.
And there’s a clear story here.
Look: when Russia invaded Ukraine, the UK (and for that matter most of the G7) imposed sanctions on Russia. So exports of cars to Russia stopped.
End of story, right? Image
Aug 13 • 29 tweets • 9 min read
🧵Here’s the extraordinary story of a Frenchman who came up with an invention that changed the world, before events took a twist.
It’s a rollercoaster story that just might help us solve one of the biggest challenges facing humanity.
Sounds far-fetched, I know, but read on… Image The man in question was Nicolas Leblanc.
Born in 1742, he trained as a doctor but was always short of cash. He became the physician to Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans - a minor French royal. Like many enlightened intellectuals, his hobby was scientific experimentation. Image
Aug 9 • 22 tweets • 7 min read
🧵Want to understand why weaning ourselves off fossil fuels like oil is such a tricky challenge?
Best place to start is with this ubiquitous toy👇
This is a thread about what I call the LEGO conundrum.
It begins when you ponder what a LEGO brick is actually made of... Image Standard Lego bricks are made of something called Acrylonitrile Butadiene Styrene.
ABS is a tough thermoplastic you often find in the handles of scissors or the frames of hard carry-on baggage cases.
But Lego bricks are prob the most iconic application.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylonit…
Image
Jul 31 • 17 tweets • 7 min read
🧵
It might look like something from space, but some folks think lumps of rock like this could help us solve one of the biggest problems facing the planet.
Others fear they could trigger ecological catastrophe.
Presenting the weird, unsettling story of polymetallic nodules Image These potato-sized mineral lumps form over millions of yrs on the ocean floor as metals accrete around organic fragments.
Up until 150 years ago no-one knew polymetallic nodules even existed. Today they're a very big deal.
So. Here are the 2 main things you need to know abt them Image
Jul 20 • 29 tweets • 10 min read
🧵
80 years ago today, newspapers in Europe carried news of the unexpected death of a very important man, in a hotel miles from the nearest city.
A man who, said some, was helping the Allies win the war.
But there was a twist to the tale. The man in question wasn't actually dead Image That man was John Maynard Keynes. The 61 year old economist was at the Mount Washington Hotel in New Hampshire for what became known as the Bretton Woods conference. And the day earlier he had indeed collapsed, following a heart attack. It was a moment of high drama. Image
Jul 10 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
It says something about how confusing Labour's green investment policies are that seemingly even the Treasury has misunderstood them.
Contrary to what the picture in this press release👇 suggests, the National Wealth Fund has nothing to do with wind power or indeed green energy Instead it's very specifically designed to focus on all the low or zero carbon technologies that AREN'T really to do with generating power.
- Green steel
- Hydrogen
- Clusters
- Gigafactories
Here's the sectors the institution will focus on 👇 Image
Jul 5 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
🧵
How did Keir Starmer manage to win a landslide majority even though fewer people voted for him than for Jeremy Corbyn in either of his election bids?
A quick thread looking beneath the numbers.
Let’s start with swing… Election nerds like to focus on two-party swing - essentially showing how voters shifted between the main parties.
And on this metric, Labour enjoyed a MASSIVE swing. 11%. Slightly more than Blair in 1997.
But there’s more to this chart than meets the eye… Image
Jul 2 • 21 tweets • 7 min read
🧵THE STRANGE CASE OF THE YAKOV GAKKEL🧵
A thread about the energy story no-one wants to talk about.
About how UK companies are helping facilitate Russia, as it earns money to finance its war.
And about how the cost of living crisis didn't end quite how you prob thought it did… But before all of that it's a story of a ship. A v unusual ship.
The Yakov Gakkel. A vessel that routinely passes these shores. As I type this it's somewhere north of Norway. But I first saw it in the English Channel.
And at first glance you might not think it all that special.. Image
Jul 1 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
🧵You know the idea, posited by @theIFS, that the main parties are engaged in a "conspiracy of silence" this election.
Their original point was about spending plans.
But I think you cld go much further.
I can think of at least 5 other areas where there's a conspiracy of silence 1⃣Taxes ARE going up under all the main parties' plans.
But they prefer not to talk about this, hiding instead behind the claim that tax rates on income tax, NICs and VAT won't rise. But they've still signed up to plans which will mean the AMOUNT of taxes we're paying will rise. Image
Jun 23 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
🧵
You've probably heard this claim - both from @rishisunak and more recently from @Nigel_Farage 👇
UK has leapfrogged others to become the world's fourth biggest exporter! And all after Brexit!
Unfortunately the reality is somewhat less impressive than this sounds.
Here's why: Image First thing to say is that the bare bones of the claim are certainly true.
Between 2021 and 2022 the UK did indeed rise from 7th in the league table of the world's biggest exporters (counting both goods and services) to 4th.
We'll get to why this happened in a moment. But still Image
Jun 20 • 11 tweets • 4 min read
🏠THREAD🏠
Why everything you thought you knew about housebuilding in the UK might actually be wrong.
A nerdy but quite important thread, with special relevance in an election where every politician is promising to build x-thousand more homes.
It begins (of course) with a chart This is the conventional picture you prob have in your mind of housebuilding in England👇
Data on housing starts or completions, divided up by who's doing the building. The govt compiles it from data on housing warranties submitted to the NHBC.
And there's a clear pattern... Image
Jun 4 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The chart I can't quite get out of my head is this one👇
Population-adjusted net migration since 1855(!)
We've NEVER seen net migration flows like this before.
Whether you put it down to post-Brexit migration rules, post-Covid shifts or something else, it's an ENORMOUS shift... Image I'm quite surprised the issue isn't even bigger this election.
Perhaps it's because it takes a while for data trends to become a cultural issue.
Think Polish plumbers, post-war Commonwealth migration or Windrush generation.
The recent flows from India/Nigeria dwarf all those...
May 31 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
Am I allowed, at this stage, to point out that... there is no such thing as a fossil fuel free book?
Like it or not, paperback & hardback books are fossil fuel products.
If that sounds odd, consider for a moment how the book you've been idly flicking through is actually made... We all know the main ingredient in paper is wood. Turning wood into paper is a v energy-intensive process.
In the UK it accounts for roughly 6% of our emissions. Mostly thru burning gas to power the mills.
Paper mills are trying to reduce their emissions. But it's not easy Image
May 15 • 6 tweets • 3 min read
V interesting new analysis out today from the @IPPR.
There have been plenty of reports saying we need to do what we can to rebuild manufacturing & grow green tech.
But WHICH SECTORS could the UK actually compete in? This report provides some of the answers news.sky.com/story/rapid-st… Full report here👇
It's precisely the kind of forensic work this govt (or the next one) needs to do on industrial strategy. We can't hope to compete with China & the US in EVERY field. So what do we focus on?
They say: heat pumps, wind and green transport ippr.org/articles/manuf…
May 14 • 13 tweets • 4 min read
🧵
Joe Biden has just confirmed he's going to raise the special tariff on electric vehicles coming from China to 100%.
Also new tariffs on batteries and solar panels.
What's going on here?
Here's a quick primer with some charts 👇 First off, a recap on what's happened with tariffs.
The standard tariff on cars is 2.5% - that's what most other nations pay.
Trump levied an extra 25% tariff on China in 2018.
Now far from changing course, Biden is doubling down - or rather quadrupling down.
Now it'll be 102.5%