As I write, the temperature in and around London has almost breached 35°C and a full two degrees above any previous record for the warmest May day on record. In India it is around 50°C, or the point at which deaths from heat stroke become more regular than rarity.
I like drawing connections; so what connects unanticipated sea-bathing in a town like Bournemouth on the south coast of England with the molten metal ladle we all admired yesterday?
Well to a great extent, fossil fuels have allowed aluminium to substitute for steel in the last century, in the way Bessemer's converter allowed for steel to sub for iron in the previous. For there are two things about the alloy you likely know already, one being that 80% of all aluminium that has ever been produced has been recycled and that the reason for that is because it is known as the 'energy' metal.
It is called this in turn because smelting it from bauxite (as I recall the ore is called) requires very considerable amounts of energy, which leads in time to sunnier days in Bournemouth. To produce recycled aluminium therefore requires just 5% of the energy needed to produce it in the first place.
Largely thanks to Mrs Thatcher's efforts and the piss-poor politicians we've had to suffer since, we've the most expensive energy in the Western world. As a result on those days I drive container-loads of chopped-up engine blocks around the UK, it is not to smelters here but to the docks where it is shipped to China and India before being shipped back to us as newly-minted product.
It is a win-win for the government, destroying the job-creation they so loathe at the same time as damaging the balance of payments. What it does most of all however is produce more carbon dioxide than ever, whilst they go about the business of the import of wind-turbines instead along with foreign companies capable of connecting it to the grid.
Napoleon described Britain as a nation of shop-keepers, and after a period during which the North and Midlands provided industries necessary to modernise a world, we've effectively gone back that way... the only difference being that now we steal from shops, whereas back in the day you'd have been deported to Australia for doing so.
Lucky buggers.
