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The result of an austerity mentality is getting none of that beautiful feeling of being able to take exactly what you need and have a bit spare as well.

The result of having a mentality of excess/abundance is a feeling of well-being and security which makes it easier to continue to grow and to maintain that security of energy supplies, food supplies, new clothing, and pleasurable activities.

Please help us as truly the lunatics have somehow taken charge of the economy.

We know there is lots of oil left such as around the Falkland Islands for example. Why wouldn't we extract this cheap and easy to access energy?

All we need is the finance as we know humans are going to keep drilling for oil in the USA, Russia, South China Sea, and Saudi Arabia well into the mid 2030s. So if the banks are going to support another 15-20 years of drilling for oil I should think The Falklands would be one of the low cost and attractive projects that will be given the go ahead.

Barryoe being another low cost, technically easy, project (especially compared to fracking in the Permian, or deep drilling in the Gulf of Mexico or offshore Brazil).

Why are the banks funding extremely complex projects, with a high level of technical risk, such as drilling 20,000 ft+ below the seabed offshore Brazil, and yet they haven't yet funded Barryoe?

Barryoe only requires drilling to 4,500 ft below the seabed and this being in much easier conditions comparatively (close to the shores of a stable economy).

Have the financial decision makers completely lost their ability to correctly assess risk (i.e., to choose the lowest cost and easiest projects)?

Yes but Australia was always a hot country. It doesn't really affect more than a few hundred thousand people who live in the outback. Australia is a vast country about 20 times the land area of the UK. 95% of Australia has always been a vast desert and scrub land that was never suitably for farming -- hence why most of Australia's wealth has come from over a century of mining iron ore, silver, gold, nickle/tungsten, and COAL. Australia sill has a large coal mining industry - their annual output is considerable and they have not made much effort to start closing down their mines unlike the UK. We here in the UK have a far larger population, far less natural resources, and yet we have chosen to impoverish about 30 million people (half our population) rather than to continue to mine coal and to press ahead with extracting easy and cheap oil such as from Barryoe. If Australia want to grumble about the climate perhaps they should look at their coal industry, their oil industry, their iron ore mining, and the massive new natural gas projects they started building off their North Coast in 2010 and which will produce fossil fuels for the next 40 years!

Also, Australia has some of the highest average temperatures on Earth. What I was taught about statistics was that you'd get more unusual variations in data which was extreme to start off with. Australia has always had an extreme climate - one of the most extreme places on Earth. Hence it is not surprising if they have more statistical anomalies than most other places in terms of their weather.

Also, the average temperatures are not really more than 0.8 Celcius higher over the past ten years than any decade since the 1920s. In the grand scheme of things this is hardly alarming. What is a 0.8 degree Celcius rise in the grand scheme of things? I think we would welcome that in the UK - even a 4 or 5 degree Celcius rise in the UK would be a good thing as it would make the weather in the UK similar to central France (and remove the need for millions of people to go on holiday there every year).

When I was younger there was a lot of thunderstorms and extreme weather events. I can't really say anything has changed in my part of the world over the last 20-30 years.

The government used to focus on things like improving people's energy security, and enabling people to own multiple homes and cars per family. It seems to me that society is going backwards - people are grumpy and starting to blame each other. I can't understand why they can't see it is the fault of the government. I could see that solar is not energy intensive enough to improve our energy security. And windfarms are okay but the companies involved were charging far too much and it was grossly unfair of the government to subsidise these people at the expense of other investors (people investing in oil, coal, ethanol production, tidal power, hydrogen fuel cells, and other energy sources).

The financial inequality has got so bad it has fractured society as badly as religion ever did (and I'm talking as badly as when people knew no better such as in the 17th century when it was Catholics vs Protestants).

I'm quite sad today, I feel society is shooting itself in the foot by not realising the value of a job in a coal-fired power station. There is still huge value in jobs such as these and it's very sad nobody is standing up against the government for the good of society as a whole.

Also, I feel a lot of scientific progress is in danger of being lost because as a society were are electing people who are just repeating what they hear others say. This is very dangerous indeed as the scientific method is the only method that has reliably improved out standard of living over several centuries. And as a scientist I have found from my own reading and analysis there is very little evidence to suggest that there is any pressing need to move away from fossil fuels. In fact there production is naturally declining and governments ought to be investing more in discovering new sources of oil, coal and planting more forests to be used as firewood in the future.

We are in danger of destroying the economy and leaving vast swathes of the population living lives that are a mere shadow of the affluent. It is extremely dangerous ... poor children will grow up blaming society once they realise how much richer children benefit from extensive overseas travel and how this broadens the mind and is fun and informative at the same time.

I think the government needs to really focus on lowering the price of fuel and air fares. To do this it needs cheap energy including extensive new investment in fossil fuels and Barryoe should also be a part of this as it makes financial sense.

Hi Fmfm,

Nice of you to wake up so late. Since 2009 I have been warning people that the Green policies will lead to mass poverty., cold homes, hungry children, and rationing of electricity through rapidly rising prices and unfair tariffs.

In fact I have been reduced to poverty myself because I put my money where my mouth was and invested heavily in oil companies and I have suffered 95% losses across my portfolio as a result. However, I am not sad for the loss of the money. I am desperately trying to get people to realise we need to burn peat, coal, wood, oil to stop poverty becoming a real problem again in Ireland and the UK, like it was back in the 1960s and 1970s. We had a couple of good decades and we can't let all of this progress be lost due to the lunatic greens who are only really out to benefit the rich. For example I was middle class and I invested in oil (many different oil companies to spread my risk) and now I am poor. My neighbour said he thought the government was mad but they were massively subsiding solar/wind and wasting tax-payers money. So he invested against his conscience (he believed they were over-generous subsidies that would result in massively unfair returns on capital vs the actual usefulness of the different projects society in terms of making people happier, healthier, and more in control of their lives). Anyway he invested against his conscience (due to the massively unfair/over-generous subsidies for green projects which were too small to contribute meaningfully to the overall battle against energy poverty) and he made twn times what he invested. So I went from middle class to poor. And he went from upper middle class to being extremely wealthy. But we are still equal really as he still respects me as he only invested to make money because he could see the government was mad which I couldn't see. But he really thinks there is no better energy source than oil in terms of its cheapness, ease to transport, and ease to exploit (a single drilling rig can produce billions of barrels). Hence he respects my investment decisions but he laughs a little that I didn't believe him when he told me that the government could go mad, and in fact they had gone mad, and they were going to throw stupid amounts of money at solar and wind and a few people would get very rich but it wouldn't do anything to fight emissions or poverty at a global level - in fact it would make the situation worse as poor people would go back to burning coal because due to the wealth inequalities and the governments subsiding the already wealthy anyone rational (any rational local governments or medium-sized enterprises) would just go back to quick-and-easy energy projects such as coal.

Evening BoomerBower,

I am not surprised. Social engineering always seemed a silly idea to me because the government forgot that if you feed the tail enough it eventually becomes heavy enough to control the dogs back legs, and then there is a struggle but then the back of the dog also gains control of the front legs (about where society is now I would guess), and then eventually the neck and the head don't control anything and turn into another tail. So you end up with a small headed dog (which used to be the tail), and a large but useless tail at the other end (which used to be a head before it came up with too many social-engineering ideas forcing the rest of the dog to allow the tail to turn itself into a head).

How can anyone say anything is worth a particular value when Wayne Rooney could turn up any minute and offer £500,000 for something which nobody else could afford to pay more than £5,000 for?

It's a huge financial and economic mess now!

Consider the wealth apparently owned by silicon valley or the Chinese manufacturing moguls. If they suddenly decided to invest in property in a particular European city prices would treble overnight. $40,000,000,000 can buy an awful lot of houses of $250,000 each. It could buy 160,000 houses to be precise - more than the size of a medium-sized city.

If some Russian oil tycoon suddenly decided to invest in property in Genoa it could lead to a doubling of property prices overnight. And at the root of this are Central Banks who seem not to realise the intractable intellectual problems created by allowing this generation of large-corporation owners to earn $40,000,000,000 in less than ten years from services which nobody pays for (most people don't pay for social media and if it wasn't offered for free would it have even become popular?)

If markets were rational my opinion is that Amazon could quite likely have a share price of nearly zero because its business model could collapse at any time like a vast conquering army suddenly realising they are expected to pay for the vast trail of destruction their expansion left behind. It is incredibly risky to assume that Amazon can continue to pay slave wages in China and also get UPS/FedEx/PostalService to continue to deliver their parcels at prices which inflict >90% losses on the investors in these companies which have to pay for fuel/vans/planes/and the future pensions of current staff.

In effect these companies are subsidising investors in Amazon and the share price is on a multiple of about 80x which seems high for a mature business (Amazon must be mature by now as how much growth is left without the government aiding and abetting the wholesale destruction of physical retailers and the 'shopping experience' which voters like to enjoy). This business model of Amazon offering cheap Chinese imports at below the cost of the materials+international shipment can't be sustainable can it? Who is paying for it all - is it Central Banks?

BoomerBower,

I am not surprised. Social engineering always seemed a silly idea to me because the government forgot that if you feed the tail enough it eventually becomes heavy enough to control the dogs back legs, and then there is a struggle but then the back of the dog also gains control of the front legs (about where society is now I would guess), and then eventually the neck and the head don't control anything and turn into another tail. So you end up with a small headed dog (which used to be the tail) and a large but useful tail at the other end (which used to be a head before it came up with too many stupid ideas and the rest of the dog chose to support the former tail instead). In short it's a huge mess now! How can anyone say anything is worth a particular value when Wayne Rooney could turn up any minute and offer £500,000 for something which nobody else could afford to pay more than £5,000 for?

The same with the wealth apparently owned by silicon valley or the Chinese manufacturing moguls. If they suddenly decided to invest in property a particular city in Europe prices would treble overnight. $40,000,000,000 can buy an awful lot of houses. Let's work it out. How many houses of $250,000 each. It could buy 160,000 houses. So if some Russian oil tycoon suddenly decided to invest in property in Genoa it could lead to a doubling of property prices overnight. And at the root of this are Central Banks who seem not to realise the intractable intellectual problems created by allowing certain people to suddenly earn $40,000,000,000 in less than ten years from a service which nobody pays for. If markets were rational Amazon would have a share price of nearly zero because it's business model could collapse at any time. It is incredibly risky to assume it can continue to pay slave wages in China and get UPS and people to continue to deliver at prices which inflict huge losses on the investors in UPS but which are in effect subsidising investors in Amazon. This business model can't be sustainable can it?

Economically the government are in a right mess.

Basically they said screw people like me, they don't need a house despite being middle class, honest, hardworking, and the best chance of paying for all the future pensions that were promised. Instead they lent money to property speculators and all kinds of frauds and liars. Ergo property prices increased massively leading to people like myself feeling more and more frustrated - but as we are honest and rational (people like myself) we were not going to buy our first home at an irrationally high price (especially by taking out a liar loan).

Also, property speculators and PR gurus earning £250,000 per year do not actually contribute anything useful to society in terms of resurfacing roads, maintaining infrastructure, or creating new energy projects to keep the lights on. However, the thing is rational and honest people are no longer going to work hard for peanuts to fix the mess the government has created (what the government contractors want).

If someone has seen houses go up from £40,000 to £240,000 over ten years they are not going to work for the same salary as a decade ago(give or take 10%). Ergo the government has a record debt (due to the fact a lot of the lending it encouraged was dishonest, short-term and 'narcissistic' - such to enable speculators to buy multiple properties - who really needs six houses?)

In my view the next government is going to have to increase salaries massively because with house prices where they are who is going to bother even doing an easy job like resurfacing roads for less than £80,000 per year (before tax). So the government is going to have to:

(1) Let the country deteriorate and not honour its future promises by inflating away the value of people's pensions
(2) Let the national debt balloon out massively to maybe 200-300% of GDP by paying people installing wind turbines £80,000 per year.
(3) Reduce the price of property so that ordinary workers can afford a decent family-sized home on a salary of £40,000 rather than £80,000.

Richard365054,

I wholeheartedly agree with everything in your last post.

What really annoyed me back in 2008 was learning how people found it so easy from 2005-2007 to self-certify mortgages which they had no hope of paying back. People who were earning £10,000 cash-in-hand (as an average apart from the odd big job) doing "dodgy" jobs were saying they had a regular income of £40,000 per year.

I can only think the politicians wanted a massive rise in house prices from 1998-2007 because if this had been their sole objective they couldn't have planned it any better. They allowed banks to lend willy-nilly and never asked anyone about balance-sheet-strength or whether the assets were really worth what was claimed by people with vested self-interests. They boosted immigration and brought in a number of inflationary benefits which were especially beneficial to those in the buy-to-let sector such as working tax credit, considerable increases to housing benefit, and made it easier to claim sickness benefits. So not only was there record number of immigrants needing to be housed but everyone from the immigrants, to the workshy, to the poorly paid was able to claim one form of benefit or another. The result was a huge tidal wash of money rushing into the economy. Of course housebuilding was frowned upon under Labour and in many years there were record low number of houses built. Just as the minimum wage was rising, benefits were being increased/made easier to claim, working tax credits were introduced to boost incomes even more, bank lending was relaxed, loan criteria were relaxed for buy-to-let, credit card debt increased and credit cards were heavily advertised, doctors received a 30% pay rise in 2004, PFI grossly overpaid contractors for the building of NHS hospitals and schools, and there was a record number of non jobs created under the last Labour government (quangos and highly paid managerial non-jobs which were just unnecessary PR/marketing roles and also other unnecessary, overly bureaucratic, roles).

So it was no surprise really that all the hope of my generation was quashed under the last labour government. I was middle class, had a good education, and pretty much couldn't afford a house and couldn't get my life on track despite being a very decent person and having a professional job. I will never forgive Labour for what they did because whilst they were creating the conditions for some people to own five or six houses they were completely ruining my chance of leading a normal life.

For example, and this is a factual and genuine example of actual price increases. In 1996 a two bed terraced house in a nice suburb of a town of 100,000 in North West England was on sale for £39,000. By 2006 the exact same house was on sale for £169,000. It was free money for anyone who speculated on property and all the hardworking majority were paying for their speculating and lavish lifestyles.

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