Robert. Perhaps I should have added an emoji to indicate I took no offence. Nor did I set you a challenge (ofset was my deliberate error).🤭

stewgreen,
can't resist this one:

I believe that our steel town could play a monumental part in the post-pandemic ‘Build Back Better’ programme

Monumental you say? Bear in mind what monuments are used for.

AK,

Sorry, I didn't mean to offend. I took spotting your deliberate mistake as a challenge, but I found more than one. They were all in spelling, and I don't think there would be disagreement between Oxford and Webster on them. I'd let it rest at that, but feel duty-bound to point out that you're still misspelling the central figure in the piece. It's Muphry, not Murphry.

On the colours of hydrogen, the whole thing is madness. I had assumed all the stuff about hydrogen was with the aim of using hydrogen fuel cells. At least that gets you most of the energy back as electricity. But no. They're just going to burn the bloody stuff. That's not going to get back 10% of the energy put into getting the H2 to your home. I get cross when the government sends out cash as a "stimulus". They've gone to all the expense of gathering that money as tax, just to send it back to the people they gathered it from. They're the world's worst bank. The hydrogen "economy" is going to dwarf that. It'll be the last word in needless waste.

Ross Lea,
That IEA piece was interesting. I liked this in the initial summary:

Our long-standing ideological disputes about what the size of the state should be, how open our economy should be, or what type of health reform we need (if any) are not going to be settled by a virus.

However, I thought they were too optimistic about what vaccines would achieve.

An end is in sight. More than one in ten people have been vaccinated and it looks as if the vaccination effort is going to be sustained. This time, the UK is ahead of the curve, as one of the world leaders of the vaccination drive.

We're already hearing about "British" and "South African" strains of the virus. What other strains will emerge, and will these vaccines really knock them on the head?
The sensible approach would have been to focus on treatment from the outset: treat the sick, not the well. I can't avoid the cynical view that selling a few million doses of treatment is much less attractive than selling a few billion doses of vaccine. With a mutating virus, they might even be selling billions of doses of the newest vaccine each year.

tomo: NG are behind the times!
From various articles on fuel for FCEVs it seems that hydrogen now comes in 3 colours.
Grey - standard industrial from steam reforming of natural gas or as a byproduct from refinery/chemical processes. In CO2 terms this is "full-fat".
Blue - this is the semi-skimmed variety, from reforming biogas, conventional reforming with some carbon capture, etc.
Green - fat-free; by renewable-powered electrolysis

Pretty soon we will have the full rainbow, as often depicted behind the unicorn!!

German Green MP calls for ban on new urban single-family houses
Anton Hofreiter says homes an unsustainable option because they use too much space and energy

A ban on building new single-family houses in popular urban areas has been mooted by a leading German Green MP, who has said they are environmentally unfriendly because they use too much space and energy.

Anton Hofreiter, parliamentary group leader of the environmental party has drawn both praise and criticism for suggesting that houses were an unsustainable option in urban areas.

“Single-family homes consume a large surface area, a lot of construction material and energy and they lead to urban sprawl and therefore generate more traffic,” he told Der Spiegel magazine in an interview.

Hofreiter said at a time when living space in many German towns and cities was increasingly scarce, and rents were soaring, the country needed to radically rethink its residential development policies.

“Local authorities should be ensuring in their development planning in congested urban areas that where there is a lack of space this is used optimally in order to create affordable living areas,” he said. “This is a central, social question particularly in our large cities.”

He also recommended that local authorities should be allowed to appropriate private homes that had been abandoned or whose owners could not be located. In a separate interview, his party colleague Chris Kühn declared: “the time of new build single-family homes is over”.

His remarks follow the recent controversial decision by a Green party district authority leader in the northern city of Hamburg to ban the construction of single-family homes.

Hofreiter has been accused of populism and attempting to restrict Germans’ freedom to choose how they live.

“The Greens have once again surpassed themselves with this populist and sanctimonious attitude,” Sören Bartol, of the left-of-centre Social Democrats said.

Christian Hirte of the Christian Democratic Union said Hofreiter’s remarks were “typical for the Greens’ disturbed relationship towards property and the reality of life in rural areas”. His colleague Christian Baldauf, the CDU’s lead candidate in the state of Rheinland-Pfalz, said Germans who wanted to build their own homes should not be dictated to. “This is an example of an anti-family, ideological policy.”

Daniel Föst of the pro-business FDP accused the Greens of “wanting to put people off the dream of owning their own home”.

The increase in inhabitants in towns and cities in Germany over the past few years together with low interest rates has caused house prices and rents to rise far quicker than incomes, creating a squeeze on living space.

But Lars Feld, one of Germany’s leading economists warned that a ban on family homes was not the answer to the problem, and would likely lead to more social inequality.

“People who already live in houses, would profit because their value would likely rise considerably,” he told Der Spiegel. “That would likely lead to a decrease in the proportion of people who own their own properties, which is anyway very low in Germany compared to the rest of the world, because people would be forced to rent. And this would lead to greater wealth inequality”.

In Germany only about 45% of the population own their own property, according to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), compared with about 65% in the UK. .

The Green party is predicted to secure a strong result in this autumn’s federal election, which could see it back in government for the first time since 2005.