NEW
Britain's motoring lobby group the @SMMT has insisted that an unprecedented 2,000% increase in car exports to Azerbaijan has NOTHING to with Russia and is explained by the fact that this former Soviet state is a “flourishing market in its own right”.
This is rather... odd
🧵 Before we get onto that, some background (thread on this here👇).
TLDR: UK car exports to Russia have collapsed, because of sanctions. But UK car exports to countries neighbouring Russia have suddenly risen by nearly the same amount. Esp Azerbaijan

https://twitter.com/edconwaysky/status/1767506597553799546?s=61&t=Ug2R7U1yPL68F7cdHrD74Q

🚨The strange tale of British luxury cars & Russian sanctions🚨
🧵A thread on some v striking charts which raise some disturbing questions abt the car industry.
Let's start at the start.
Wealthy Russians love high-end British cars.
Don't just take it from me. Take it from her 👇 So when Russia invaded Ukraine, it was not without significance that all Britain's major carmakers said they would stop sending their cars to Russia.
Anyway, shortly afterwards, the UK imposed sanctions which made it illegal to do so anyway...

💷BUDGET THREAD💷
A few thoughts on what was supposed to be a big event but ended up feeling, well, a wee bit thin.
And that’s the first thing to say.
Strikingly, this Budget was HALF as big as the Autumn Statement. Look at the difference between the scorecard totals 👇

Was it a tax-cutting Budget?
I mean… not really.
Well, OK, the net impact is taxes aren’t going up as quickly as they were 6 months ago.
But (and I think this is pretty crucial) THEY’RE STILL GOING UP. The tax burden will be higher at the end of this Parliament than before.

https://twitter.com/edconwaysky/status/1765376139571208194

🧵Here's a thread about an obscure economic theory from a century and a half ago, which is about to become a MASSIVE deal.
⚡️It helps explains why tackling climate change is going to be v v hard. Some say impossible.
The story begins with this building👇
Yes it's the @SphereVegas.
Not just a massive entertainment venue but also the world's biggest screen. By all accounts it's an amazing spectacle both outside and in, where there's also a ginormous wraparound LED screen (also one of the biggest anywhere)

https://x.com/sarahkenny2/status/1758252252836376779?s=46

🚨How British companies are bolstering Vladimir Putin’s war machine🚨
A depressing thread.
But an important one.
With some pretty shocking charts.
Let’s begin with the “official” picture. It suggests UK trade with Russia has collapsed since Feb 2022. Down by 74%… Now let's fill in the data.
Look how we're no longer exporting cars or heavy machinery to Russia. Because the govt is well aware this stuff could be repurposed into weapons. So the official line is that this is a big success story.
Looks like Russia's economy is being starved

With Tata steel having just confirmed the closure of the two blast furnaces at Port Talbot, here are a few important datapoints.
First, UK steelmaking has collapsed faster, over the past half century, than ANY other country in the world save for Venezuela.
Pretty shocking👇 The Tata plan is to replace the two blast furnaces with two electric arc furnaces.
There are some strong arguments - not all of which come back to net zero.
One is that Britain produces more than enough scrap steel to satisfy its needs. At the moment this is mostly exported

Here’s one of the blast furnaces at Port Talbot being tapped. Witnessing it is an extraordinary experience. What you’re looking at here is molten pig iron, hotter than lava, coursing out.
Blast furnaces exist to turn rock (rich in iron) into metal.
They are breathtaking places… The problem is, the main product of these blast furnaces (there are two at Port Talbot) is actually not iron, but carbon. About a tonne and a half of carbon for every tonne of iron.
In carbon terms, blast furnaces are the single most concentrated source of pollution anywhere…

Here’s the story of how the discovery of some islands off the coast of South America changed the world forever, in unexpected ways.
It also helps explain why rivers & coasts around the world are constantly smeared with sewage.
Bizarre but true.
Anyway, here are the islands👇 They’re called the Chincha Islands, in Peru.
No humans live there but a LOT of birds do.
Over time those birds left rather a lot of droppings.
But unlike in most other bird colonies, it barely ever rains, so instead of being washed away those droppings just built up over time.

I went to one of the world's biggest glass factories & it was REALLY cool.
Here's what I saw👇

The factory is the @Encirc plant in Cheshire.
It's enormous. Acres & acres.
If you poured anything from a glass bottle in the UK this Xmas there's a good chance it came from here...
🧵 🍾Glass is ultimately melted SAND, with a few important additives🏝️
📖Much more on this in Material World if you're interested (it's incredibly interesting).
The sand gets shovelled into a massive furnace (the world's biggest for containers) from these big hoppers at the end.

🌞Here's a short story abt how I went to Morocco to see one of the world's biggest solar plants.
It didn't go quite as I expected

This is the Noor complex near Ouarzazate.
It's massive. Bigger than the capital of Morocco.
Europe (& UK) plan to import solar power from Morocco.
🧵 This place is interesting because it's actually not a traditional solar plant.
Most solar power these days is PV or photovoltaic👇
Solar energy hits the silicon panel and is converted straight into electricity.
Noor has a section devoted to PV. But in this case it's a sideshow...

⚡️INERTIA⚡️
The magic ingredient at the heart of our power systems.
It's also one of the obstacles to replacing fossil fuels with renewables.
In short, a REALLY big deal!
But most folks have never heard of it.
It's widely considered too complex.
So. Here's your idiot's guide
🧵 Key thing here is to remember that for most of history most of our power has come from turbines spinning.
Steam turbines in coal and nuclear power stations. Gas or hydro turbines.
When you think of the electricity grid, think of lots of big wheels turning, all around the country.

🪨BALL CLAY🪨
A mineral few have heard of. But it's one of the critical ingredients we're going to need if we want to eliminate carbon emissions in the coming years.
Why? Because ball clay is the key component of something called electrical porcelain. Which is a BIG deal.
🧵 You'll have seen electrical porcelain, but probably without noticing it.
It's usually turned into "bushings" - those brown serrated bits you see in substations and sometimes on pylons.
That's electrical porcelain, and it insulates the cable going into a big transformer 👇

NEW
The UK is pumping tens of thousands of tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere because it's dramatically under-using the batteries connected to the grid.
A pretty gob-smacking story that underlines the dysfunctions of our power system 👇 news.sky.com/story/uk-pumpi… The background to this story is that the amount of battery storage on the UK grid has risen rapidly in recent years👇
Right now batteries are mostly used to provide what's known as "frequency response" - essentially keeping the grid ticking over. And they're doing it quite a lot

The @resfoundation report today, Ending Stagnation, is an excellent primer on much of what's gone wrong with the UK economy.
300 pages and zillions of charts.
I have one or two quibbles...
But in the meantime here are a few of my favourite charts
economy2030.resolutionfoundation.org/reports/ending… If there's a single chart you want to take from it, it's prob this one 👇
Basically we've dropped back dramatically vs where we were heading. This is real earnings but you see a similarly-shaped line for productivity, growth, disposable income and the rest...

I can well understand why everyone's framing this Virgin Atlantic flight/stunt today around the fact that the plane is being powered by cooking oil 🍟
Makes for a good headline.
But this is prob the least interesting thing abt sustainable aviation fuel... news.sky.com/story/pioneeri… You see what we call "Sustainable Aviation Fuel" is actually a whole category of many different products. Powering planes with fats, oils & greases oils is only one category - the simplest & least revolutionary.
For a start it only reduces life cycle carbon emissions by c.70%

🔋STRATEGY🔋
The govt's slightly peculiar decision to publish its battery strategy on Sunday without much fanfare made me wonder whether it would, like the semiconductor strategy before it, be somewhat disappointing. Actually the analysis is quite good assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/6560b092… Plenty in there on the challenge from overseas, including some good data from @benchmarkmin and some striking charts like this one 👇 on the astonishing rise in imports of batteries from China

NEW
- Bank of England votes to leave interest rates on hold at 5.25%
- Cuts forecast for economic growth for next three years. UK economy forecast to flatline through til early 2025.
Governor: “It's much too early to be thinking about rate cuts." Flatlining. This chart tells you all you need to know about the latest @bankofengland growth forecast…

🌊THREAD🚾
Here's the story of a battle between two men long ago whose consequences we're still living out.
It set us on the road to today's sewage system, where leaks are commonplace - in UK & cities across the world.
It's the most important story you've never been told... What follows is a fraction of a much bigger story - how we ended up with the dysfunctional system of water & sewage we have today. Of shameful decisions from politicians of all stripes.
I've spent the past few months making a film about this. Please watch!

🧵In the years running up to the Oct 7 attacks, the economy of Gaza had become more benighted than nearly any other region of the world.
Some charts telling this miserable story, starting with this
Living standards haven't just stagnated since 1994. They're down by nearly half 👇 This dismal performance is underlined when you compare GDP per capita in Gaza to the West Bank.
Up until Hamas took control the two lines were pretty correlated. But just look at how they diverged since then. Hard to think of a more stark illustration of economic collapse

Net zero is the single biggest industrial & economic challenge modern society has set itself.
It’s ENORMOUS.
Every previous energy transition - from wood to coal, coal to oil, oil to gas/nuclear etc - involved moving UP a thermodynamic ladder. Our fuels got more energy dense! In committing to net zero we are shifting DOWN to less dense sources of energy (eg solar/wind/battery storage).
Not only that, we’re aiming to do it in decades. Every previous energy transition took MUCH longer.
In other words we’re aiming to do something totally unprecedented

There have been quite a few bailouts and “critical support packages” for the UK steel sector in recent decades. What makes today’s one different?
A few quick thoughts on the Tata steel package today.
First & most important, this is a LOT of money. 🧵
news.sky.com/story/tata-ste… Also, as we reported today (& I reported months ago when I made a film about steel), these hundreds of millions of pounds will only protect a fraction - maybe a quarter of the 4k jobs at Port Talbot.
Which might seem like an odd kind of support package… news.sky.com/story/why-the-…