It’s almost here – the darkness and the icy death grip of winter. Some may not feel the full sting of it, if you live in sunny and warm climates, while other brave souls embrace it. Having had fingers so numb I couldn’t unlock a door, I tend to be not as thrilled, but in truth it makes no sense to go through life hating one of the four seasons just because it can be unpleasant. Whether you like or loathe winter though, if your home must endure one you have to respect it. Winter can kill you. Very quickly. Perhaps you’ve had a bad experience in the dead of winter and know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, it is very sobering. Say your car breaks down or gets stuck some distance from other people. A simple event like this can be life-threatening, and at the very least, if not prepared for it, the situation will be extremely unpleasant. Those of us in urban environments, which is most of us nowadays, don’t really think about this much because either help or shelter is never far away. That is simply a given, and a dead car on a side street is generally no more than an annoyance even at -25 degrees. We can see this readily when people pop out of cars on any given winter day with clothes that would no keep them alive for ten minutes or in footwear that couldn’t traverse more than a sidewalk’s width of snow. It doesn’t take much imagination to see how relentlessly we take for granted our heat sources. We can most easily see that phenomenon by thinking of other dangerous situations that we never forget. Imagine having a close call in traffic; say some driver blows a red light at high speed, and the only thing between you and oblivion was the fact that you happened to catch a glimpse of the idiot out of the corner of your eye in time. You will remember that split-second until the day you die, and you’ll tell the story to others for that long too. Now imagine that some errant construction worker struck a natural gas pipeline that supplied any sort of decently sized city in the dead of winter. A single incident like that could catastrophically cut off the heat supply for tens of thousands of people, instantly. And as anyone who’s experienced -25 degree temperatures (or worse) knows, you would feel the absence of that heat in minutes, or even seconds. Now consider how fossil fuels, all fossil fuels, are vilified relentlessly. The natural gas baby gets thrown out with the same bathwater that includes coal. Does anyone think for a second about the safety or integrity or even the presence of those natural gas pipelines? On balance, is the average person more likely to be scornful of natural gas as a fossil fuel, or to be filled with gratitude at having one’s life prolonged in those long winter nights? This coming winter, whenever you step outside and feel that icy blast on your face, give a thought to what made possible the heat you just stepped out of, and how incredibly fragile its existence really is. A million bad things could happen to any one of those pipelines, and your life may well depend on those things not happening, just as surely as it would be saved by glimpsing a speeding car at the right instant. And consider carefully everything you hear about how deadly fossil fuels are. This article was originally posted at Public Energy Number One

Pt. 2 Electric and Hydrogen Vehicles - the crucial difference between a Media Interview and a Presentation?:  Conclusions The Presentation might now continue as follows (from Pt.1)  ... "The West's rush for EV's still requires inhumane conditions and poverty to persist  - e.g. in DRC mines, where the biggest cobalt reserves are currently found. The West's clean air comes at a high human cost. All this for EV car batteries, (also batteries for smartphones, tablets etc).    There's another elephant in the room. EV's will require a vast infrastructure of electric charging points. Think of all those huge apartment blocks housing car owners.  Both EV's and HV's need a large amount of initial energy. EV's need it continuously to feed the huge infrastructure of charging points. The demand will keep growing as well. HV's need it to produce the hydrogen fuel itself, but the vehicle fuelling infrastructure is already present with networks of petrol stations. Natural Gas and LNG are still vital for generating the energy of EV's and HV's. (Renewables are too inconsistent and paltry; subsidised by high energy bills - which penalises the poor, not the rich - create more emissions in their manufacture, construction, maintenance and dismantling than they re-pay, and in the case of solar panels are full of toxic waste that cannot be disposed of)."Green is not as green as it appears to be. On top of which environmentalists are very quiet on the carnage being meted out to flying creatures.  Hydrogen vehicle fuel is making ground. Germany has just launched its first hydrogen train. California and Hawaii are just two US states fully developing hydrogen fuel. NASA uses hydrogen fuel to launch space shuttles.   Natural Gas - LNG (and nuclear, where the waste is not "waste" but a resource that can be returned to) are abundant sources for generating the energy required to produce the Hydrogen. Mozambique is becoming a new supplier in Africa   So, the presentation might then come to its conclusion: Hydrogen is a simple element; found throughout the universe. It doesn't come from exploiting human poverty. What are the HV emissions? Water."   Here's the point and the crucial difference between the Presentation and the Media Interview.    In the Presentationwe tend to work towards our conclusions, showing the proof on the way. In the Media Interview(especially TV, Radio and any broadcast) you might only have 15-30 seconds to give an answer, so always start with your conclusion. You can elaborate on the reasons if you then have some more time to use.   Contact: rogercrisp@gmx.co.uk / rogercrisp.com / Linkedin: Roger Crisp (Consultancy) Media Advisor & Trainer / Speaker-Presenter on: - Dealing effectively with the Media (TV, Radio, Press, Blog, Vlog) - Climate Change - Energy

Twenty-plus years ago I lived in England, had a Sri Lankan boyfriend, an Israeli best friend who shared a flat with a Palestinian guy, and a Persian housemate. This is still my idea of multiculturalism. Yet 20 years later what I read and see about Europe -- and Turkey but that's a different question altogether -- suggests the multicultural model governments have been shoving down people's throats has begun to backfire and it is backfiring spectacularly. Take the hidden camera film about the encapsulated Muslim neighbourhoods in Paris. This is no spin and no fake news. I have a friend who lives and Paris and she has vouched for the genuineness of these neighbourhoods. There are similar places in Germany, too, if we are to believe none other than Angela Merkel, who said in an interview such encapsulated areas have no place in the German society. Ironic, given she put a lot of effort into taking migration to ridiculous levels. Then there's Denmark, where I saw (hopefully because I only had three days) multiculturalism still working, probably because the country, as far as I remember, limited its intake of economic (sic) refugees. There I saw people of various colors all smiling and friendly, as befits one of the happiest nations in the world. And then I saw a boy that eyed me suspiciously for several minutes until I felt extremely uncomfortable (I went out to smoke and forgot the keys to the Airbnb, okay? Don't tell anyone). That one single boy is new to the country, I'm sure. I really hope he won't look at this very typical Middle Eastern way at people in five years. Because he will have assimilated. Assimilation is the only sensible way of actually accomplishing multiculturalism that doesn't give rise to racist extremists. I will here quote Mr. Schwarz, an expat in a country neighbouring his home one, who, after 20 years here says "We" when he talks about the locals and "they" when he talks about his countrymen and countrywomen. The only way to have a decent life in a foreign country even one that is culturally close to your home one, is to assimilate, learn the language and the culture, and make it your own. This emphatically does not suggest you need to give up your own culture or religion. What it does suggest is that if you want to live in a society you need to become a part of it, rather than an appendage that feeds from a society, operates in it, but remains a separate part of that society and, ultimately, does not contribute to the greater good. That's what encapsulation is all about and to me, it is the one single negative aspect of the recent migration waves that can bring the whole European Union down. How did we get here? We need to thank PC gone mad and congenital human stupidity. The more you force a group of people to accept something new and unfamiliar as normal and familiar without giving them enough time to process this thing, the more they will clench their teeth and refuse to eat it. The pendulum, as I like to say, always swings. The further it swings into one direction, the further it will then swing into the opposite one. it's just one of these laws that can't be violated. And personally, I believe Western Europe is being so stupid because they have no group memory of the Ottoman empire ruling over them. We do although we won't continue to have this memory for long as history is being rewritten. Literally.