We’re doomed!” (apologies to Frazer, Dad’s Army)
The world is awash with experts, or so it would seem. Experts have been guiding our decision makers for years and now we find ourselves pulling up the drawbridges as fast as we can because we have allowed ambition and ego to override any sensibilities we may still have. Their (expensive) advice is increasingly being ignored by the idealogues that are running the place. You have to wonder why they bother to ask for advice if they are just going to do whatever anyway.
Put simply, we have run out of other people's money as Maggie Thatcher once said. When we look at our shiny new asset we never seem to think that it is our children and their children that are actually going to pay for it. With inflation, if not already bedded in, lurking in the background, borrowing to move forward is becoming less and less of an option. Estimates and long term plans are not worth the paper they are written on because the figures therein have a nasty habit of inflating before you get to use them.
We would all like to have a super efficient EV to save the planet but who is going to pay to maintain and improve the creaking infrastructure that is necessary to keep them on the road. Now I hear that we are looking at a scenario of running out of helium which is produced as a byproduct of the oil and natural gas industry which we are trying desperately to shut down, but is very necessary in a small, but critical, number of industrial and medical processes. Humans, being what they are, waste it on party balloons. When it is gone, it is gone, and there is no replacement in sight.
Decisions re climate, no matter what the "experts" say are either nonexistent or way off the mark. Keep the earth's temperature at less than 1.5 degrees below pre industrial levels by 2050 and we will be okay. Well, apparently we are there now just a few years later.
God help us.
Geoff Orchard, Hamilton