phasing out of fossil fuels - programme

[Slim]

1 hour ago, peterboat said:

8 years and half a million miles for a Tesla so give it a few years and it might catch up!

Assuming it's still going.?

[IanD]

5 hours ago, Jen-in-Wellies said:

The two you've missed out are walking and cycling. When the 1955 photo was taken, most people would be getting around that way, along with buses and trams. Employment and shopping would be much more likely to be closer to their homes. The government are making a (for Tories) reasonably good start on encouraging both, with considerable complaints from a noisy minority over a few bike lanes and traffic restricted areas so you can cycle without feeling like you could die at any second and walking without choking on fumes. A lot more still to do. It is a long process, a lot of which involves reducing the distances people travel to reach the places they regularly need to go as well as changing the way they get there.

Jen

Agree with all that. There's also a possible plus point from Covid-19 that many companies (and individuals) have discovered they don't need to go into an office every day -- or at all in some cases, my last day in the office was in March and I don't expect to get back in before next April -- and this will cut down on the number of commuting car journeys if it continues. Might lead to a rise in the domestic murder rate though... ?

[mrsmelly]

2 hours ago, David Mack said:

 

Or how much space car parking takes up compared with cycle parking.

 

And the point was well made as long ago as 1965 by London Transport

All looks marvelous except the one bus doesnt go anywhere near 68 of the 69 people who want to get on it and the bicycle is very dangerous with six bags of shopping hanging off the handlebars and three kids and the wife on the cross bar.

[Ronaldo47]

The other week on the radio someone was reminiscing about how, in 1960's Africa, even in a remote village you could aways find someone who could repair your British-built car, and that  nowadays everyone drives Toyotas that never need repairing. 

 

[mrsmelly]

3 minutes ago, Ronaldo47 said:

The other week on the radio someone was reminiscing about how, in 1960's Africa, even in a remote village you could aways find someone who could repair your British-built car, and that  nowadays everyone drives Toyotas that never need repairing. 

 

Precisely. The Australians always say if you go into the bush take a Land rover but if you want to come back go in a Toyota, so very true sad to say.

[Cheshire cat]

2 hours ago, Murflynn said:

what?  2 people sharing a pickled egg as a substantial meal are considered to be lucky?

Yes, they've only got to eat half each

[Cheshire cat]

I really don't think cycling is the way forward and I say that as someone who has cycled more than 5000 miles this year. Have you looked out of the window today? All those bikes bought during lockdown won't see the light of day until April. It's simply too cold and wet.

 

I was brought up on estate like the one Jen showed in her photo. The Cul-de-sacs were grassy areas until the late sixties when the council realised no one had got anywhere to keep their cars. The road I currently live on pre dates the motor car. At some point gateways were widened to accommodate cars and garages built.

 

Nowadays the cars are too big for the garages so its normal for one vehicles to be on the drive and the other half on the road, half on the pavement. Happy days.

[magpie patrick]

16 hours ago, IanD said:

I completely agree that too many cars being driven too much are an environmental problem, but objecting to BEVs because they might make driving more attractive and increase mileage a little bit doesn't stack up -- even if that does happen it's still better to drive a bit more in something that pollutes far less.

I'm not opposed to BEV and would have one myself under different circumstances - I did encourage Magpie the Elder some years ago as with a garage and seldom making long trips he was ideally placed. He didn't take up the suggestion and I'm now driving his Ford Fusion as he hast stopped driving - if he had I might now be driving a Renault Zoe.

However, almost every cycle or public transport scheme I am working on at present is being driven by a climate change agenda - not only is that where the funding is but that is what is capturing the imagination, villages and towns want these schemes because they are carbon free. BEV is stealing this thunder, and my guess is in two or three years most of these initiatives will fall over because electric cars are seen as the answer. 

 

16 hours ago, IanD said:

What's more likely is that taxes on owning a car and driving it will go up as a way to discourage this, and that CAAS (cars as a service -- shared or glorified taxis, depending on your point of view) will be promoted because it makes much better use of the vehicles that there are -- most cars spend most of their time parked, which just on its own massively increases the CO2 burden of manufacturing them many times over.

 

The way we buy and use cars now has been driven by cheap fossil fuel and ignoring climate change, and this clearly can't continue so people's attitude to and use of cars is going to have to change -- and the same applies to cheap untaxed CO2-spewing airliners, it shouldn't be possible to fly away for the weekend for fifty quid, just like it never used to be. And then there's shipping cheap crap round the world and throwing it away after a couple of years, that also has a huge C02 impact.

 

A lot of things we do are going to have to change and a lot of people aren't going to like it, because our society has been built on cheap energy from fossil fuels and we don't want to give up what this has brought us...

I will be honest and say I think you are being unduly optimistic - we have had cheap fossil fuels and are going to power our cars with cheap electricity, the costs don't really alter. People already pay eye watering amounts for brand new cars and for the more expensive ones high levels of tax don't see to be a disincentive either. Add to that the tailoring of vehicles and the CAAS is going to struggle to make much impact. I have a child seat in mine, for some trips I must have it, and for me not to have my own car you would need to guarantee that the CAAS would be fitted with one. 

Taxing car use and car ownership was first suggested over 100 years ago ( I can look up exactly when in Plowden, The Motorcar and Politics which is on the shelves in my office). Successive governments have toyed with the idea and all have failed save for the Road Fund Licence, tax on fuel and the odd toll road. It's not as if taxing cars to oblivion is a new idea, it's just that it's one that no one has dared implement and as far as they have (fuel duty, road tax increments) it's made bugger all difference. 

I think it was Harold Macmillan (I may have the wrong 1960's politician) who said "we are nourishing a monster" with the way that car use was being pandered to. He was right, and we're still doing it. 

[IanD]

I think there will still be strong pressure to reduce car usage even with BEV -- until the Holy Grail of essentially unlimited zero-carbon energy comes along, which probably means fusion power, which has been 20 years away for the last 50 years. I didn't mean cars will disappear entirely, but there will probably be strong pressure to be less profligate with energy all round, including cars.

 

The reason CAAS doesn't really work yet is that somebody still has to drive them and their wages have to be paid. Autonomous cars will no doubt happen sooner or later even though it's a difficult and expensive problem to solve, and this will very likely change the picture -- why have an expensive lump of metal sitting idle on your drive or in a parking space and wasting money more than 90% of the time when you can be picked up in a few minutes by a clean non-racist robocar and driven there in comfort and silence while reading a book or whatever?

 

It's possible that owning a car may eventually go the same way as private trains did, not only obsolete but becoming seen as something wasteful and ostentatious (and dangerous!) instead of a status symbol. But given many people's irrational obsession with their cars, this could be a long time coming...

[Jen-in-Wellies]

7 minutes ago, IanD said:

when you can be picked up in a few minutes by a clean non-racist robocar and driven there in comfort and silence while reading a book or whatever?

The tech companies have already solved the being racist part of the traditional taxi driving job. Just got to work out the driving bit.

Edited December 4, 2020 by Jen-in-Wellies

[Murflynn]

54 minutes ago, Cheshire cat said:

Yes, they've only got to eat half each

which poses the question - if a pair of people sharing a table in a pub order a pickled egg to share as their substantial meal and then decide not to eat it because it tastes 'orribull, are they in contravention of the pub/customer code of practice?

[Murflynn]

27 minutes ago, magpie patrick said:

 

 

I will be honest and say I think you are being unduly optimistic - we have had cheap fossil fuels and are going to power our cars with cheap electricity, the costs don't really alter. People already pay eye watering amounts for brand new cars and for the more expensive ones high levels of tax don't see to be a disincentive either. Add to that the tailoring of vehicles and the CAAS is going to struggle to make much impact. I have a child seat in mine, for some trips I must have it, and for me not to have my own car you would need to guarantee that the CAAS would be fitted with one. 

 

in my case I might take 2 dogs for a walk in the muddy countryside, then go to B&Q to collect bags of sand and cement and 3m long timber one day, then the next day I tow my boat 100 miles to the slipway, where it stays for a week before I retrieve the boat (sometime doing damage to the tyres/wheels and underbody because of the poor state of a couple of the slipways that I use.

 

how will I do that if I don't own my own versatile car that I don't mind getting mucky, and occasionally suffering minor damage that I can live with?

 

how will a farmer who has a 4x4 that is used for towing on the farm, towing on the road, and general family duties, manage?

[Alan de Enfield]

18 minutes ago, Murflynn said:

in my case I might take 2 dogs for a walk in the muddy countryside, then go to B&Q to collect bags of sand and cement and 3m long timber one day, then the next day I tow my boat 100 miles to the slipway, where it stays for a week before I retrieve the boat (sometime doing damage to the tyres/wheels and underbody because of the poor state of a couple of the slipways that I use.

 

how will I do that if I don't own my own versatile car that I don't mind getting mucky, and occasionally suffering minor damage that I can live with?

 

how will a farmer who has a 4x4 that is used for towing on the farm, towing on the road, and general family duties, manage?

 

I think there is only a very small number of electric cars that are homologated for towing - and thats limited to a 'small' trailer.

 

NO towing a 2-ton boat / trailer

NO towing a 2.5 ton horse trailer and horse

NO towing a 3.5 ton horse trailer and horse

NO taking half-a-dozen cattle to cattle market.

 

For a while the Tesla Model X was the only electric car homologated for towing, but now it's been joined by a handful of others - the Audi e-tron and Mercedes EQC can tow up to 1,800kg, and the Jaguar I-Pace manages 750kg.

 

 

 

As Engineering Explained's Jason Fenske describes in this video, the energy density of electric cars leaves much to be desired. The current state of battery technology is such that only so much energy can be stored in a package that's not too big for a passenger car. The Model X's 100-kWh battery pack has the most energy storage of any production EV. The EPA certified the Model X Long Range as being able to go 328 miles between charges.

When you add a trailer to the mix, that range goes way down. Fenske details a couple of hypothetical trailering scenarios for a Model X in this video. In one, he simulates a family taking their Model X on a camping trip, driving 100 miles up a 1-percent grade at 75 mph. Factoring the 5500-pound weight of the Model X itself, plus 500 lb of payload and 5000 lb of trailer, increased drag coefficient from the trailer, rolling resistance, and gravity, Fenske calculates that 100.4 kWh is needed to make that trip. In other words, you'd need to recharge to make it.

That's not factoring use of HVAC and other ancillary systems either. Fenske calculates that doing the same trip without the trailer would only take around half the energy, and towing the trailer at 60 mph requires 84 kWh of energy. Essentially, a trailer can kill EV driving range.

For comparison, he runs the same 75-mph trailering uphill scenario with a Ford F-150. That truck comes with a choice of 23- or 36-gallon fuel tanks. Given that a gallon of gas is equivalent to 33 kWh of energy, that means the Ford has around 775 to 1200 kWh of energy capacity. The trip would require 170 kWh of energy, so the 23-gallon F-150 would only need to operate at around 21 percent efficiency to do it, while the 36-gallon truck only needs to work at around 14 percent.

 

From the 'Drive Electric' website :

 

Can I tow a caravan with an electric or a hybrid car? | DrivingElectric

[IanD]

1 hour ago, Murflynn said:

in my case I might take 2 dogs for a walk in the muddy countryside, then go to B&Q to collect bags of sand and cement and 3m long timber one day, then the next day I tow my boat 100 miles to the slipway, where it stays for a week before I retrieve the boat (sometime doing damage to the tyres/wheels and underbody because of the poor state of a couple of the slipways that I use.

 

how will I do that if I don't own my own versatile car that I don't mind getting mucky, and occasionally suffering minor damage that I can live with?

 

how will a farmer who has a 4x4 that is used for towing on the farm, towing on the road, and general family duties, manage?

You're all doing the usual exceptionalism objection, just like "I have to drive 400 miles without stopping so BEVs are useless".

 

Yes of course there are cases where people really *need* a car, for example if I do a band booking with hundreds of pounds weight of PA equipment in the back.

 

But this isn't the case for the vast majority of car journeys (95%? 98%? 99%?) in the same way that 400 miles non-stop isn't.

 

The farmer genuinely needs a 4x4 and people use the same argument to justify them, ignoring the fact that >90% of 4x4s have never been off-road in their lives (go and look it up...) since there there aren't many muddy fields on the drive to the supermarket or on the school run or in Chelsea.

 

Unless you live in the middle of rural Wales, in which case you might need one even for that ?

Edited December 4, 2020 by IanD

[ditchcrawler]

4 minutes ago, IanD said:

 

 

The farmer genuinely needs a 4x4 and people use the same argument, ignoring the fact that IIRC 95% of 4x4s have never been off-road since there there aren't many muddy fields on the drive to the supermarket or on the school run.

 

And most of them are fitted with tyres that wouldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding. The first Range Rover I bought got stuck on a wet grass slope "once".

[IanD]

9 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:

And most of them are fitted with tyres that wouldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding. The first Range Rover I bought got stuck on a wet grass slope "once".

Never mind people driving them with summer tyres on snow and then wondering why they still can't get anywhere or crash, just like the two-wheel drive cars. In this case any 2WD car on all-season or winter tyres will go and stop better than any 4x4 on summer tyres, especially if they're the fashionable wide low-profile kind that most of them are fitted with -- because for most people they're purely a lifestyle choice which doesn't *need* to pull the skin off a rice pudding, and unfortunately the plague of them is responsible for average car emissions/fuel economy getting worse not better recently in spite of the drive to lower CO2 emissions.

 

If you drive one from choice not need (so not a trailer-towing farmer in Wales, or a professional rice-pudding-puller) and want to argue that this isn't the case, please come armed with facts not opinions ?

Edited December 4, 2020 by IanD

[magpie patrick]

3 minutes ago, IanD said:

But this isn't the case for the vast majority of car journeys (95%? 98%? 99%?) in the same way that 400 miles non-stop isn't.

If I compare my parallel lifestyles (I spend enough time in Frome and in Marple to "live" in both places... 

In Marple the car arrives, gets put in the drive and is next started a week later when it's time to go home. If I have something bulky to take to dad's care home I use the car, but a taxi would do the same job. 

 

In Frome I use the car virtually every day - although the two towns are about the same size Frome's major supermarkets are on the edge whereas in Marple they're in the middle, I need to drive to the next town (Shepton) in Frome whereas I can get to the next town by bus or train in Marple.  

I did go car free in Frome for two years because I had  a seizure - it was bloody hard work (and we had buses to Sainsbury and to Shepton then!) - the car club (which I helped set up)  hasn't really worked because if you need a car in Frome you need it every day. Commuting to the next town by bus just doesn't happen, nor does shopping without one unless you live near the supermarkets

 

Generally I have a metropolitan outlook, until I moved to Frome I had always lived in cities, and I still think like a city dweller in many ways, but on car dependency, so much is proposed that just doesn't work even in a largish market town. 

Electric cars work here - I regularly used a Citroen C0 when the car club had one, they can reach the next town. Sharing cars doesn't, it's been an option here for ten years and it's hardly used because even the die hard greens (and believe me the South West has plenty of those) need a car every day. I wish they didn't, much of what I do locally is aimed at reducing car dependency, but without  a sea change in urban management* for market towns, they will.  

*Subsidised half hourly electric buses to Bath would be good, along with an hourly rail service that sped to the cities rather than the random timetable of slowcoaches we have now - people will drive into Bath and pay £15 to park rather than use the bus

[ditchcrawler]

6 minutes ago, IanD said:

Never mind people driving them with summer tyres on snow and then wondering why they still can't get anywhere or crash, just like the two-wheel drive cars. In this case any 2WD car on all-season or winter tyres will go and stop better than any 4x4 on summer tyres, especially if they're the fashionable wide low-profile kind that most of them are fitted with -- because for most people they're purely a lifestyle choice which doesn't *need* to pull the skin off a rice pudding, and unfortunately the plague of them is responsible for average car emissions/fuel economy getting worse not better recently in spite of the drive to lower CO2 emissions.

 

If you drive one from choice not need (so not a trailer-towing farmer in Wales, or a professional rice-pudding-puller) and want to argue that this isn't the case, please come armed with facts not opinions ?

The othere a lot of the owners dont realise is that 4 wheel drive doesnt help when you put your foot on the breaks

[IanD]

14 minutes ago, magpie patrick said:

If I compare my parallel lifestyles (I spend enough time in Frome and in Marple to "live" in both places... 

In Marple the car arrives, gets put in the drive and is next started a week later when it's time to go home. If I have something bulky to take to dad's care home I use the car, but a taxi would do the same job. 

 

In Frome I use the car virtually every day - although the two towns are about the same size Frome's major supermarkets are on the edge whereas in Marple they're in the middle, I need to drive to the next town (Shepton) in Frome whereas I can get to the next town by bus or train in Marple.  

I did go car free in Frome for two years because I had  a seizure - it was bloody hard work (and we had buses to Sainsbury and to Shepton then!) - the car club (which I helped set up)  hasn't really worked because if you need a car in Frome you need it every day. Commuting to the next town by bus just doesn't happen, nor does shopping without one unless you live near the supermarkets

 

Generally I have a metropolitan outlook, until I moved to Frome I had always lived in cities, and I still think like a city dweller in many ways, but on car dependency, so much is proposed that just doesn't work even in a largish market town. 

Electric cars work here - I regularly used a Citroen C0 when the car club had one, they can reach the next town. Sharing cars doesn't, it's been an option here for ten years and it's hardly used because even the die hard greens (and believe me the South West has plenty of those) need a car every day. I wish they didn't, much of what I do locally is aimed at reducing car dependency, but without  a sea change in urban management* for market towns, they will.  

*Subsidised half hourly electric buses to Bath would be good, along with an hourly rail service that sped to the cities rather than the random timetable of slowcoaches we have now - people will drive into Bath and pay £15 to park rather than use the bus

I'm not saying that cars should be banned or that *everyone* should shift to BEV or CAAS, there will always be so-called edge cases where this doesn't work.

 

Once charging is sorted out, for the vast majority of people BEVs will work just fine and are far better for the environment than ICE -- no amount of dislike for them or love for petrol engines is going to alter this fact.

 

Once CAAS is sorted out I suspect a lot of people will find they don't need to own a car at all, just like quite a lot of people I know in London (yes I know about public transport here...) -- for the few occasions they really *need* a car, they hire one, the rest of the time they don't have a deteriorating money sink sitting on the drive they don't have.

 

Those who genuinely still need cars (or 4x4s) will continue to need them, for everyone else there will be much greener solutions ?

12 minutes ago, ditchcrawler said:

The othere a lot of the owners dont realise is that 4 wheel drive doesnt help when you put your foot on the breaks

Hence "or crash"... ?

Edited December 4, 2020 by IanD

[mrsmelly]

2 minutes ago, IanD said:

I'm not saying that cars should be banned or that *everyone* should shift to BEV or CAAS, there will always be so-called edge cases where this doesn't work.

 

Once charging is sorted out, for the vast majority of people BEVs will work just fine and are far better for the environment than ICE -- no amount of dislike for them or love for petrol engines is going to alter this fact.

 

Once CAAS is sorted out I suspect a lot of people will find they don't need to own a car at all, just like quite a lot of people I now in London (yes I know about public transport here...).

 

Those who genuinely still need cars (or 4x4s) will continue to need them, for everyone else there will be much greener solutions ?

Hence "or crash"... ?

One problem of course is that the vast majority of us don't live in or near London and wouldn't move there even if housing was free, its a horrendous place. 50 plus million of us live elsewhere with many in rural towns and villages and not even on the distant horizon is there yet anything like a replacement for the privately owned ice vehicle. In the past change has brought about an improvement in lifestyle and the problem we have with electric cars is they are very much a retrograde step in so many ways. Something has to change but how and when is far from decided and dates thrown out willy nilly by governments and politicians that will not be around to be held to account are pointless and just political waffle. 

[IanD]

9 minutes ago, mrsmelly said:

One problem of course is that the vast majority of us don't live in or near London and wouldn't move there even if housing was free, its a horrendous place. 50 plus million of us live elsewhere with many in rural towns and villages and not even on the distant horizon is there yet anything like a replacement for the privately owned ice vehicle. In the past change has brought about an improvement in lifestyle and the problem we have with electric cars is they are very much a retrograde step in so many ways. Something has to change but how and when is far from decided and dates thrown out willy nilly by governments and politicians that will not be around to be held to account are pointless and just political waffle. 

Bullsh*t.

[mrsmelly]

2 minutes ago, IanD said:

Bullsh*t.

Yes I agree much in your posts is such but we will see what happens with regards transport in the fullness of time. 

[Thomas C King]

4 hours ago, Jen-in-Wellies said:

The tech companies have already solved the being racist part of the traditional taxi driving job. Just got to work out the driving bit.

To be fair, that was really more a reflection of the people whom the chatbot was learning from, rather than the tech company (MS, in this case).

[peterboat]

5 hours ago, Alan de Enfield said:

 

I think there is only a very small number of electric cars that are homologated for towing - and thats limited to a 'small' trailer.

 

NO towing a 2-ton boat / trailer

NO towing a 2.5 ton horse trailer and horse

NO towing a 3.5 ton horse trailer and horse

NO taking half-a-dozen cattle to cattle market.

 

For a while the Tesla Model X was the only electric car homologated for towing, but now it's been joined by a handful of others - the Audi e-tron and Mercedes EQC can tow up to 1,800kg, and the Jaguar I-Pace manages 750kg.

 

 

 

As Engineering Explained's Jason Fenske describes in this video, the energy density of electric cars leaves much to be desired. The current state of battery technology is such that only so much energy can be stored in a package that's not too big for a passenger car. The Model X's 100-kWh battery pack has the most energy storage of any production EV. The EPA certified the Model X Long Range as being able to go 328 miles between charges.

When you add a trailer to the mix, that range goes way down. Fenske details a couple of hypothetical trailering scenarios for a Model X in this video. In one, he simulates a family taking their Model X on a camping trip, driving 100 miles up a 1-percent grade at 75 mph. Factoring the 5500-pound weight of the Model X itself, plus 500 lb of payload and 5000 lb of trailer, increased drag coefficient from the trailer, rolling resistance, and gravity, Fenske calculates that 100.4 kWh is needed to make that trip. In other words, you'd need to recharge to make it.

That's not factoring use of HVAC and other ancillary systems either. Fenske calculates that doing the same trip without the trailer would only take around half the energy, and towing the trailer at 60 mph requires 84 kWh of energy. Essentially, a trailer can kill EV driving range.

For comparison, he runs the same 75-mph trailering uphill scenario with a Ford F-150. That truck comes with a choice of 23- or 36-gallon fuel tanks. Given that a gallon of gas is equivalent to 33 kWh of energy, that means the Ford has around 775 to 1200 kWh of energy capacity. The trip would require 170 kWh of energy, so the 23-gallon F-150 would only need to operate at around 21 percent efficiency to do it, while the 36-gallon truck only needs to work at around 14 percent.

 

From the 'Drive Electric' website :

 

Can I tow a caravan with an electric or a hybrid car? | DrivingElectric

Electric caravans problem solved 

4 hours ago, mrsmelly said:

One problem of course is that the vast majority of us don't live in or near London and wouldn't move there even if housing was free, its a horrendous place. 50 plus million of us live elsewhere with many in rural towns and villages and not even on the distant horizon is there yet anything like a replacement for the privately owned ice vehicle. In the past change has brought about an improvement in lifestyle and the problem we have with electric cars is they are very much a retrograde step in so many ways. Something has to change but how and when is far from decided and dates thrown out willy nilly by governments and politicians that will not be around to be held to account are pointless and just political waffle. 

You are going to be deeply upset in the future Tim

[Ronaldo47]

I am certainly not a climate change denier but I do wonder what impact the early UK reduction will actually have in practice, given  that it was mentioned in a recent radio programme that the UK is only responsible for about 1% of the world's man-made CO2 emissions.  It's like the UK being responsible for one hole in a collander. Even if we close our hole  completely, it will have no real impact when other countries are actually making new holes by cutting down rain forests or building coal-fired power stations. 

 

There is also the unexpressed assumption thst there is such a thing as a normal climate and a normal temperature. I must admit to not being a professional  geologist, but  have always taken a great interest in the subject since my schooldays   Even in our present  post-glacial era, Europe's mean temperature has not been steady but has fluctuated from century to century with negligible assistance from man.  Things were significantly warmer in the Roman era, when grape vines were easily cultivated in Britannia. In the  Viking era, say from about 1200 years ago, the coastal regions of Greenland were warm enough to support viable colonies - calling the newly-discovered land "Greenland" was not entirely Viking spin to attract colonists. By the 1600's Europe's climate became colder.  Trees no longer grow in regions of Ireand and Scotland where they used to thrive, as evidenced by tree roots found in bogs. 

 

It is sometimes asserted that government policy (in general) l is supported by the figures. When I was a Civil Servant I once attended a senior management course that included a session on statistics. Now when I was at University I learned how to use statistical methods to establish the truth about things:  batch sampling to ensure that manufactured items were within specified tolerances,  how long is something expected to last before it develops a fault, etc.  Analyse the data first, and then make objective conclusions based on the data.

 

Not so with the government. I learned that the usual procedure was to put the cart before the horse by deciding policy first and then requiring their civil servants to produce figures in support of that policy afterwards. In real life, figures from different sources rarely agree, and you can nearly always find something  to support your view. As an exercise, all participants were given identical sets of genuine official statistics and the same policy statement. Half were asked to present figure showing the statement was true, the rest that it was false. We were each able to produce figures supporting the two opposite policies.

 

So you will understsnd my cynicism whenever I hear a minister refer to what the figures show: I muse on the supressed figures that could well point to a different conclusion, or indeed the figures that have not been collected at all for the same reason.

 

Edited December 5, 2020 by Ronaldo47
Typos