In the news

Private Eye was reporting on charity-run homes run by Percy Headley Foundation on Tyneside that when faced with Ofsted reports stating homes needed improvement due to safety and staff training issues, they just shut them instead.

Thank you for putting this abject behaviour into words..

Well it is only 4000 tonnes of CO2 per year.
Maybe it is a proof of concept and can easily be scaled up with diminishing costs
for a plant 10x the size?

doesn’t even have its own staff - they’re entirely agency provided

Sounds like a specific kind of nightmare, your home always full of complete strangers.

I was a support worker for people with learning disabilities for a few years when I first moved up to Manchester. We were a private run charity kinda place that was actually pretty good, looking after a few people who had been institutionalised in the big horrible hospitals in the decades before. The kind of thing you described is awful, and thankfully never went on to that extent in the places I worked but it's easy to see how it comes about. It's a really hard job that is physically and emotionally draining, and the pay is absolutely shite, staff turnover was really high, I was the longest serving staff member after I left after about 5 years not including managers, who were around less due to promotions,and having a consistent team in place is massively important to improve people's lives rather than just stop them dying in a house. Even back then we had a lot of agency staff filling in gaps but at least they were usually the same people, unfortunately the agencies are where the money is, they charge much more per shift to the company for those workers compared to what regular staff get paid and take a big slice for themselves, and the quality of work, even if the staff member is great, will be worse because it's not a consistent person. It's bullshit privatisation and capitalism extracting profit from people's wellbeing and lives, I can only imagine it's worse now 15 odd years later.

Isn't it ...

“Because when you turn the vessel back toward France, when it is across the median line it has to be intercepted and rescued by the French and it appears the French will simply not engage with this, in which case it’s – if you excuse the pun – dead in the water.”

The 870 cars figure must relate to only the CO2 cost of building them. The fuel to run a typical car over 120,000 miles runs to about 30 tonnes CO2.

120000 miles at 45 mpg (let's be realistic) = 2666 gallons = 12100 litres.

1 kg of petrol produces 2.7 kg CO2 when burned

12100 litres = 32700 kg CO2 = roughly 30 tonnes CO2

Give or take a bit because 1 litre is not 1 kg. Some cars are more and less fuel efficient. A lot of cars go further than 120k miles. Diesel is 3.3 kg CO2 per kg etc etc. But that's your ballpark.

How can 1kg of petrol produce 2.7kg CO2 ie more than it weighs?

Because it's burning in oxygen not included in the 1kg of petrol.

In recent years Australia has had a revolution in disability support, choice and control is in the hands of the person with the disability now which is fantastic... The system isn't perfect but it's much better than it was when I arrived here six plus years ago... Support workers are paid a fair wage and standards of care have improved dramatically...

One downside is there's now a thriving private support sector, all you need is an ABN (self employed tax number) and away you go, you can get paid almost $60 per hour (the casual rate is around $35 per hour) with very little or no training... It's attracting the wrong kind of people and abuse and exploitation are an issue, I've seen it with my own eyes working on the management side... I'm hoping legislation will come in to bring in mandatory training for this section of the workforce bit it's been very slow to materialise...

I work as a support coordinator/case manager these days so get to see these clowns in action all the time, it depresses the fuck out of me... I'm making it my job to get rid of as many of the bad ones as I can, one at a time...

Always thought you'd make a great serial killer.

It is a proof of concept thing. This article has more info on how it works, and talks about 2 plants being built, 1 in Canada and 1 in Scotland, that will each remove amillion metric tons of carbon dioxide a year from the atmosphere:

https://thebulletin.org/2021/08/carbon-capture-dream-or-nightmare-could-be-coming-or-not/

New Irish CCS facility.

I realise that there's only one place in the universe that really matters, but it looks as if some Ruislippers' knowledge of geography leaves something to be desired ...

As a 'solution', although probably an interesting experiment, it's a non-starter, as with all this 'how can we justify continuing to do exactly what we did before, only now with extra carbon sequestration or electrickery instead of naughty emissions at point of use' bollocks. Angela Merkel just said at the International Automobile Exhibition in Munich that the German car industry isn't only a part of the 'climate problem', but also part of the solution! Yay! Because it converts everything to electricity now! (Never mind that this will lead to even higher energy consumption than before ...) People with their snouts in the trough are absolutely hopeless on this.

The only thing that will help (and it's probably too late) is less, less, less, but that just doesn't fit into the 'modern' world.

A friend of mine was a nurse 25 years ago, and the problems were already the same in principle back then. Overly expensive, constantly-changing, casual agency staff without any knowledge of the ward had to be called in all the time and caused the regular staff almost more problems in having to manage them and explain everything than if they hadn't been there. The 'privatisation'/'internal market' merely drove costs up rather than down, as promised because of 'competition', which was, of course, the real intention. All this nonsense about 'we need more funding' is caused by the increasing inefficiency of completely Balkanised structures designed to hide how public money is siphoned back into cronyrupt pockets. Rinse, repeat--it's a lot harder to change the tax regime than to stealthily couch in obscurantist management jargon how your favourite party political donor can recoup their investment.

Keeping people dependent through ineffective work is one way in which this is perpetuated, knowing that sanctions or punishment are very unlikely.

Well done to your wife there. I take it she has to be with a private company, too? Or does she have her own company?

electrickery
cronyrupt

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as @rj says. You're making CO2 out of C and adding the O2. You get the mass of all the carbon atoms plus, for each carbon atom, two oxygen atoms. Heavy stuff.

I could have sworn the largest jewel in the crown was called The Star Of India but when I googled it turned out to be a curry house in Leytonstone. Then I thought it must be the diamond Richard Burton bought Liz Taylor for her 40th but that was South African too, the Krupp.

Yeh you're probably thinking of the Koh-i-Nor, classic Indian restaurant name, it is a whopper but tiny compared to the largest
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koh-i-Noor

I've seen the Star of India. Its a sapphire in the Natural History museum in New York

that was South African too, the Krupp.

That's a bit harsh. He spent a lot of money on it.

He met Taylor when she was an MGM starlet, she was sunbathing by a pool in Hollywood. Burton walked past and burst out laughing because her astounding beauty was so improbable.

Taylor had the Krupp mounted in a ring, when Princess Margaret saw it she said “Is that the famous diamond? It’s so large! How very vulgar!”

Taylor: “Yes, ain’t it great?"

Margaret: “Would you mind if I tried it on?”

and burst out laughing because her astounding beauty was so improbable.

Had he not met Sophia Loren?

Liz Taylor pissed all over Sophia Loren.

I'll be having a good think about that later on.

Only a rumour mate, only a rumour.