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Environmentalism

More World Development Movement in speculation in food.

Sad, sad, piece at CiF to which I added this comment:

Oh dearie me. Having actually read the WDM report I\’m sorry but you really do fail to show what you contend you show.

Firstly, as Seth says above, you just don\’t understand that futures and derivatives are, by definition, among those who trade them, a zero sum game. If any one buyer of seller of a future (or other derivative) makes money then some other buyer or seller must make an equal and opposite loss.

If Goldmans is making a profit all that is is that they are better at it than others….some other speculators, by definition, must have lost the same amount.

The value of the whole edifice though is not zero sum. It enables the transference of risk: from the farmer and the industrial user of the commodity to the speculators in the middle. This is a good thing.

Secondly, and with resepct the food price rises of 2006/8, the prices of futures provide us both with information and with the incentives to do something.

Let us recall what actually happened back then. Various groups like Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, WWF and so on, the alphabet soup of the environmental NGOs (whether all of them backed biofuels I cannot remember and at least one of them later decided they were a very bad idea) convinced the EU and the US government that biofuels and ethanol made from agricultural crops (corn mostly but wheat as well) were a good idea. The politicians enacted mandates which stated that a certain percentage of all petrol sold must be biofuels.

This, not unnaturally, placed a certain strain upon supplies of corn and wheat. No, I can\’t remember what percentage of the crop would now need to be turned into fuel for cars rather than food for people but we did see the effects pretty quickly. The tortilla riots in Mexico for example were the direct result of rising US corn prices as more was turned into ethanol rather than corn flour.

So, what we now want is some system of both reducing demand for corn and wheat and some incentive to increase the production of corn and wheat. A rise in prices will do nicely here.

Now here comes the futures markets. As Adam Smith pointed out (yes, his example was indeed a wheat trader, he takes a few pages to explain his ideas.) what speculation does is move these prices around in time.

Imagine we had no speculation at all? Not even physical hoarding. If such a new use for corn and wheat was mandated, then we\’d all carry on eating corn and wheat as we had done. Farmers would carry on planting as they had done. And then, some months after the mandate had come into effect we would go to get more corn or wheat from the granaries and there wouldn\’t be any. Thus starvation.

What the speculation does is looks into the future and says, hey, there\’s going to be a shortage in the future. Prices will rise in the future. So if I buy now to sell then I can make a profit. This raises prices now.

So, consumers get the message that corn and wheat are going to be in short supply and they use less now. They subsititute: instead of corn or wheat they eat rice, cassava, potatoes. Farmers also get the message. Hey, I can get higher price for my corn or wheat next year. I\’ll plant more, use that marginal land, fertilise the crop more and so on. So, consumption falls and production rises.

And as we saw, over 2006/8 (a couple of harvests don\’t forget) consumption did fall a bit, despite the new use for cars and production also increased a bit. And prices came back from their highs.

So our analysis of what happened should really be this.

Environmentalists and governments, through either idiocy or malevolence, decided to put food into cars rather than people. This will clearly create a shortage in the future.

Futures markets spotted that future shortage and through their actions (motivated only by greed recall, it was only love of filthy lucre, not any desire to do good) moved the higher prices forward from the future to the present. These higher prices reduced consumption and increased production meaning that when we got to the future there wasn\’t that shortage caused by the idiocy or malevolence of the environmentalists and governments.

The futures markets stopped people starving in 2008/9/10.

And yet you want to blame the futures markets? Seriously? The very mechanism which managed the fuck up created by biofuels, you\’re blaming the people who cleared up this fuck up rather than the people who caused the fuck up?

Finally, please do go back and read your own report again. You note that there was not a deep and liquid speculative market in rice or rice futures. There was and is in corn and wheat. If it was speculation that increased the price spike then we should have seen a greater spike in corn and wheat than in rice. But as your report also points out, the price spike was *larger* in rice than in corn and wheat.

Thus futures markets reduce price spikes, reduce price volatility, not increase it. Your own report proves you wrong.

Oh dearie me

Mr. Aslet would do well to ponder a moment.

Naturally, the northern Europeans behaved better, the Germans and Scandinavians disciplined by Calvinism and hygiene. Britain tried hard to clean up its act in the post-war years, introducing legislation for clean air, washing the soot of generations from St Paul\’s and other buildings, introducing Best Kept Village competitions and Keep Britain Tidy campaigns. Cleanliness became something of which we were proud, like other communal endeavours, such as the National Health Service.

Now we are shamed by countries such as Japan and Singapore, where they would no more think of littering than a taxi driver might forgo his white gloves. The CPRE says there has been a 500 per cent increase in litter since my parents were tut-tutting in the 1960s. What has happened?

It is partly the rise of selfish individualism, at the expense of the shared values of restraint. The Sixties had something to do with it; shared values seemed part of the stuffiness and conformism that young people found so repressive. (Reader, with my then shoulder-length hair, I was one of them.) Then came Thatcherism, which, for different reasons, had the effect of exulting the individual over society. To the yuppie, litter was something for other people to pick up.

Hyper-individualism, decline of the community blah, blah….Thatcher!

It\’s actually much, much simpler than that.

We used to have a system where you paid a flat fee through your rates (now council tax) which paid for a  team of men to come around and cart away your rubbish.

Now you still have to pay that flat fee (one that isn\’t quite so flat, or at least is flat at a much higher altitude) and you also have to pay per amount of rubbish that you wish the team to deal with.

Those fees can be quite substantial for things like fridges etc.

Thus, to absolutely no one\’s surprise at all, fridges are turning up behind hedges rather than in the care of those team of men we\’ve already paid for.

It\’s not the rise of individualism or the triumph of neo-liberal economics that\’s causing the problem: it\’s the simple ignorance of the economics of incentives on the part of our rulers that is.

Think, just for a moment. Not all that long ago getting rid of a junk car was, while not exactly highly profitable, at least an income generating operation. Get it to the scrap yard, fill out the registration doc to show that it had been junked and receive £25 or £50. Now, you make the same trip, same car and same document, but must hand over £25 or £50 for the privilege of having your car junked.

If we were to ponder, before such a change happened, on what we think might happen, we would predict that there will be a rise in cars simply abandoned on the streets. We have turned getting rid of a car from an activity which provides an evening\’s drinking for a couple to something that swallows an evening\’s drinking for a couple. We have, while only changing the incentives by £100, moved the financial incentive from positive to negative.

What has happened since this change? We have more cars abandoned on the streets.

So why is anyone surprised?

This is interesting

In the 85 days of the leak, the worst oil disaster in history, nearly 184m gallons of crude oil is estimated to have gushed into the Gulf of Mexico, the ninth largest body of water in the world.

OK.

The oil that gushed also added to natural oil and gas leaks into Gulf waters. These occur all the time from the sea bed, and the US Department of Energy estimates that there may be 5,000 active \”seeps\” in the northern Gulf alone. One researcher calculated in 2000 that 500,000 barrels of oil – 84m gallons – naturally gets into the Gulf each year, but is never cleaned up.

Oooh, now that is interesting.

So the oil from this \”biggest ecological disaster ever\” is about two times what turns up entirely naturally every year anyway. And we know that the naturally turning up stuff doesn\’t accumulate, doesn\’t cause major environmental problems, is, in fact, cleaned up by entirely natural means. Bacteria eating it, dilution, whatever.

If the man made spill had been 20 x, or 200 x, then we\’d probably be sensible enough to wonder how on earth that could all be cleaned up. But 2 x? Give it a couple of years and it\’ll be gone, no?

Most amusing

The mammoths were suffering from the rising temperatures anyway, say the scientists, but hunting by Stone Age Man made things much worse. As they became scarcer, birch saplings – which the giant beasts used to graze down – grew to maturity, turning grassland into forest in Siberia, Alaska and Northern Canada. This darkened the landscape, enabling the earth to absorb more heat.

Ancient pollen preserved in lake sediments throughout the far north show a rapid rise in the number of birch trees 15,000 years ago, when hunters arrived in the area and mammoth populations crashed.

Climate sceptics are already dismissing the idea as evidence that their adversaries will say any warming is man-made. But Carnegie\’s Dr Chris Doughty sticks to his guns: \”A lot of people still think we are unable to affect the climate, even when there are more than six billion of us,\” he says. \”This shows that, even when we had populations of magnitudes smaller than we do now, we still had a big impact.\”

The amusement comes from the way in which other environmentalists (some/many, to taste) insist that Stone Age man did no such thing. The logic seems to be that as the hunter gatherer is truly the Noble Savage, the only type of human truly in touch with the environment, it of course cannot be true that such were responsible for hunting out the larger animals.

The disappearance of the megafauna, the mammoths, the North American horse when the Clovis culture turned up, the largest of the marsupials and birds when the Aborigines arrived, the larger birds when the Maori arrived….no, no, these are just coincidence you see? It\’s the climate change which enabled the people to turn up which caused the extinctions, not primitive man.

We\’re only allowed to get to man really wiping out animals when we get to the dodo: that was European, white, capitalist and industrial, man and we all know they\’re evil.

Doing it all with renewables

The European Union could obtain 92% of its energy from renewable sources such as wind and solar by 2050 while cutting carbon emissions by 95% compared with 1990, according to a report.

Gosh, that\’s nice. So, how do we get there?

claims a mixture of existing technologies plus the widespread adoption of electric cars and demand reduction initiatives would allow a dramatic change in energy requirements without a huge reduction in quality of life.

Aaaah….demand reduction eh? Is this our usual \”if everyone just uses 50% less energy then our sums add up\” thing?

And reduction in quality of life: that\’s determined by whom? The yurt dwellers at Greenpeace?

The report is here.

Already
today, businesses active in resource-efficient and renewable energy
technologies form a significant part of the economy, providing
millions of sustainable jobs in Europe.5

Oooh, my, we\’re only in the introduction and already we find an economic fallacy. Yes, jobs are a cost, not a benefit of such schemes.

But an answer is within reach: energy savings and
renewable energy, with zero fuel costs, zero reliance on scarce
resources, and zero climate damaging emissions, is an increasingly
attractive option.

That, I\’m afraid, is pure bullshit. There are no power generation systems which are zero carbon. Windmills and hydro have emissions: about the same as nuclear actually. And solar is about three times that level. And as for zero reliance upon scarce resources: what the hell are all of these things going to be built out of? Any economic good is by definition a scarce resource. And while I know I often argue that the technological revolution isn\’t going to be derailed by a shortage of the metals (gallium, germanium, neodymium etc) necessary to run it that\’s absolutely not the same as saying they\’re not scarce resources. They have an available supply and a price attached to them: they are scarce resources.

This scenario requires the rapid
phasing out of nuclear power generation and assumes a maximum
lifetime of 20 years for coal-fired power plants, half the technical
lifetime of such plants.

Oh dear again. So we\’re going to make it all more expensive by deliberately throwing away perfectly good, working, plant are we?

Exploitation of the large existing energy efficiency potential will
ensure that primary energy demand is reduced by more than a
third, from the current 73,880 PJ/a (2007) to 46,030 PJ/a in
2050, compared to 75,920 PJ/a in the Reference scenario. This
dramatic reduction is a crucial prerequisite for achieving a
significant share of renewable energy sources in the overall
energy supply system, compensating for the phasing out of
nuclear energy and reducing the consumption of fossil fuels.

No, not a 50% reduction….well, actually, yes, it probably is more than a 50% reduction from a business as usual projection. So we do have \”if everyone just uses 50% less energy then our sums add up\”.

A
significant share of the fluctuating power generation from wind
and solar photovoltaics will be used to supply electricity for
vehicle batteries and produce hydrogen as a secondary fuel in
transport and industry.

Given that I am in favour of that then I must be in favour of that, obviously. But I\’m not yet sure whether the primary generation is going to be cheap enough to make that work. To cover the conversion losses in using H2 as the battery in the system you do have to have really cheap primary electricity generation. Actually, in this next bit, yes, they do say that primary generation will be cheap enough to cover those losses.

Aaaaaah, here\’s what they\’re doing.

The worldwide photovoltaics (PV) market has been growing at over
35% per annum in recent years and the contribution it can make to
electricity generation is starting to become significant. The
importance of photovoltaics comes from its
decentralised/centralised character, its flexibility for use in an urban
environment and huge potential for cost reduction. Development
work is focused on improving existing modules and system
components by increasing their energy efficiency and reducing
material usage. Technologies like PV thin film (using alternative
semiconductor materials) or dye sensitive solar cells are developing
quickly and present a huge potential for cost reduction. The mature
technology crystalline silicon, with a proven lifetime of 30 years, is
continually increasing its cell and module efficiency (by 0.5%
annually), whereas the cell thickness is rapidly decreasing (from
230 to 180 microns over the last five years). Commercial module
efficiency varies from 14 to 21%, depending on silicon quality and
fabrication process.
The learning factor for PV modules has been fairly constant over the
last 30 years, with a cost reduction of 20% each time the installed
capacity doubles, indicating a high rate of technical learning.
Assuming a globally installed capacity of 1,600 GW by between
2030 and 2040 in the basic Energy [R]evolution scenario, and with
an electricity output of 2,600 TWh, we can expect that generation
costs of around 5-10 cents/kWh (depending on the region) will be
achieved. During the following five to ten years, PV will become
competitive with retail electricity prices in many parts of the world,
and competitive with fossil fuel costs by 2030. The advanced Energy
[R]evolution version shows faster growth, with PV capacity reaching
439 GW by 2020 – ten years ahead of the basic scenario.

Technology will save us after all.

This is really quite lovely. In order to make all their sums about planning everything work out they have assumed (quite rightly to my mind) that the cost/performance increases of recent decades will continue for several more decades.

However, if and when renewables become cheaper than fossil fuels (and in this prediction above they\’re cheaper even without putting a price upon carbon emissions) then of course we don\’t actually need to have a whole lot of planning, do we? We\’ll all naturally switch over to the cheaper form of energy generation as the current capital stock runs out.

So, in order to make the case for their planning they\’ve made an assumption which means that planning isn\’t required.

We can forget the rest of this report then.

Lordy Lean, you\’re still wrong!

Renewable energy typically employs at least three times as many people per dollar invested as fossil fuels

You continually trot out this point as if it\’s a benefit.

When, of course, jobs are a cost, not a benefit, of such plans.

Get with reality can\’t you? Having more people producing energy means that we have fewer people available to produce everything else….making us poorer.

On this zerocarbon Britain thing

OK, so, first we assume the can opener:

There is huge potential to decrease energy
demand without decreasing the services that
are provided. In zerocarbonbritain2030, energy
demand is decreased by over 50%.

It\’s the only way to make the numbers work of course. In decreasing demand from housing:

Decrease area requiring heat,

Quite how making us all live in rabbit hutches is not decreasing the services are provided isn\’t said.

Decrease the thermostat/air temperature

Similarly, reducing the temperature at which we live not being reducing the services offered by heating the places in which we live isn\’t discussed.

On cars and transport:

Improvements in battery technology are
expected in the future, and concerns about
supply limits on raw materials are unfounded.

Isn\’t that delightful? They\’re entirely willing to use the \”technology will save us\” argument when it suits them: plus wave away any problems over resource availability. If you\’ll allowe me those two let outs I can prove (as Julian Simon did) that we can have an ever rising number of people living ever richer lives for the next 7 billion years.

We use some lignocellulosic
biofuels in the zerocarbonbritain2030 scenario
to power the sectors for which there is
currently no alternative to liquid hydrocarbon
fuels: aviation, shipping, some heavy goods
vehicles and some farm machinery. 1.67
million hectares of land in Great Britain is
devoted to producing the feedstock. We
assume a corresponding reduction in meat
consumption, so that there will be no net
increase in land use.

That\’s, what, 7, 8 % of total land area? Around and about the total land area currently devoted to buildings actually. Most green, don\’t you think?

In the zerocarbonbritain2030 scenario an
absolute reduction in transit is required.
Passenger kilometres travelled domestically
decrease by 20%, spread evenly across all
modes. Domestic aviation is eliminated and
international aviation decreases by two thirds
due to limits on biofuel supply. Some shorthaul
flights can be replaced with trains and
ships but an absolute reduction in transit is
also likely to be required.

Umm, this is a decrease in services provided, isn\’t it?

In the zerocarbonbritain2030 scenario
abundant food for the population is produced
but livestock products are reduced to 20-30%
of their present quantity. Cow and sheep
stocks in particular are much reduced.The
levels of egg, poultry and pig-meat production
are only a little lower than today…

We\’re not going to reduce the services on offer but at least 80% cuts in cows and sheep. Beef, mutton, wool, lamb and leather are more of those services we\’ll not be cutting then, eh?

Plus, of course, we\’ve just fucked organic farming right over as there\’s no shit to keep it going.

Good one really.

Something like 60% of electricity comes from wind. Umm, haven\’t they realised that the wind doesn\’t blow all the time? No, not even over an area as large as gthe UK and offshore areas?

Ooooh, this is a good one! Cement production is going to decline to 10% of current levels. Yes, this is to be done at the same time as we need lots and lots and lots of cement to anchor all those windmills. Good one that….

So, just to sum up: we\’re all to live in colder, smaller, houses, eat no meat and travel less. But there will be no reduction in the services on offer. And to get from here to there we\’re assuming both technology as yet undeveloped and no shortage of resources.

As I said earlier, the New Economics Foundation is involved so of course it was bound to be bollocks.

Matthew Taylor\’s new book

Or at least, Mahd Mahdi\’s interpretation of it.

What kind of human beings we want to be, what kind of society we want, are always ethical questions, he insists. Again, he cites scientific research that shows how deeply rooted ethical understanding is in the human brain. Ethical reasoning and debate need to be resurrected. We need an ethics that challenges the dominant logics of market, bureaucracy, and scientific and technological development.

I do hope that there\’s lots of Adam Smith in that book.

For he, of course, wrote extensively on empathy (what he called sympathy) in Theory of Moral Sentiments just as he did extensively upon markets in Wealth of Nations.

Indeed, as he pointed out, there\’s no conflict between the two at all: far from it, one begets the other. It is through that wide extension of trade that we realise that those not of family or tribe are indeed just like us and thus we empathise with them.

Which makes this rather interesting:

The question is whether our capacity for empathy can expand to the human species, the globe and the biosphere in time to prevent the destruction of the environmental resources on which we depend. Empathy can save us, believes Taylor; it is vital to negotiations on how we share out natural resources, and vital to ensure harmonious co-existence on a crowded planet.

If Smith is right (and I of course tend to think that he is) then the environmentalists are doing themselves no favours. We need to extend empathy to all: but if empathy is something extended by trade, how can this sit alongside the environmentalist insistence that we must curb trade and all become more self-sufficient?

Jeremy Leggett….again

such as BP\’s annual announcement that there is 40 years of supply or more, and no danger of supply falling short of demand, so ambushing oil-addicted economies.

He keeps making this statement and keeps ignoring all of the attempts made to correct him on it.

There is no such thing as demand exceeding supply: there is only the balancing of supply and demand at a price. As long as we stick with a market system price will change so as to balance that supply and demand.

If prices rise then demand falls: if supply falls then prices will rise and thus demand fall.

Still, we should give him credit for this:

In the interim, I pointed out, more and more people had become worried about the prospect for a premature peak in global oil production, not least the companies in the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security (ITPOES).

As far as I can tell this \”UK Industry\” task force is six companies out of the 2.15 million registered for VAT. But, gather up a few buddies, give yourself an impressive sounding name and your pronouncements, indistinguishable from those made by you on your tod as a solar panel salesman, are more likely to get picked up and greeted with a chin stroke rather than the guffaws and hoots of derision they deserve.

So even as Mr. Leggett fails Econ 101 he seems to be mastering PR101. My, aren\’t we the lucky ones?

On organic farming

This is something I hadn\’t realised (shows how much of a city boy I really am):

Under my crop rotation, I grow wheat five times in a decade, and produce nearly four tons an acre. My organic counterpart will grow wheat only three times, yielding around two tons per acre. In the time I have produced 20 tons, he will be lucky to get six. And in the intervening years I can grow sugar beet, peas, beans or oilseed rape, whereas he needs to rest his soil with clover and grass.

Whenever we see comparisons of the yields between organic and conventional farming we see them presented as one year yields. Or at least, that\’s the impression I have.

But the need for the organic farmer to leave land fallow obviously flatters such comparisons if we try to measure what we really want to know, which is production over time.

Yields from organic are thus even worse than I had thought, no?

Not really going to work

The UK\’s domestic properties need to be renovated to a high energy efficiency standard at a rate of 700,000 a year in order to have renovated them all by the year 2050. We need to do this because there are 28 million homes in the UK which are responsible for 27% of our greenhouse gas emissions, most of them will still be standing by then, and they need to be treated to make a contribution to meeting our national targets of reducing these emissions by 80% by 2050.

OK, so how much per house?

Neil gave some costs: they are allocating a budget of £120,000 per property for a sustainable renovation.

Err, what?

28,000,000 houses times £120,000, if I\’ve got my zeros right that\’s £3,360,000,000,000.

Erm, £3.3 trillion? Over two year\’s GDP just to spend on the housing stock? £84 billion a year over 40 years?

5% to 6% of GDP each and every year?

This just isn\’t going to work, is it? Those costs are so much vastly higher than whatever the damages from climate change might be that we\’d be better off just putting up with it.

I do hope I have got my zeros wrong there. Otherwise we\’ve serious evidence that people haven\’t been reading their Stern Review. You know, the one that said it will costs us 1-2% of GDP each year in total to solve climate change? Rather than 6% just to retrofit housing?

Monbiot on BP

Well, yes, externalities should be paid for, this is true:

A paper by the New Economics Foundation in 2006 used government estimates of the cost of carbon emissions to calculate the liabilities of Shell and BP. It found that while the two companies had just posted profits of £25bn, they had incurred costs in the same year of £46.5bn. The oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico from the Deepwater Horizon well is scarcely more damaging, and its eventual impacts scarcely more expensive, than the oil that is captured by neighbouring rigs then processed and burnt as intended……….

There is an alternative, but it is unlikely to materialise. Just as Norway has treated its oil money not as profit but as provision against a tougher future, so the governments in whose territories oil companies work should force them to pay into a decommissioning fund. The levy should reflect the costs that economists are able to calculate, plus a contingency for those we can\’t yet foresee.

This would outrage the oil firms, as it would render many of them unprofitable. But there\’s a simple answer to that: the money currently defined as profit is nothing of the kind.

But to say that the externalities of the use of oil should be paid by the companies doing the drilling for oil isn\’t quite true. They might not be a bad place to collect them, it being fairly simple at that stage of the process. But the costs of those externalities should be bourne by those who use the oil brought up, not purely by the capitalists who are bringing it up.

And of course there are already mechanisms in place to do this. Take us in the UK, just as one example. We have fuel duty. And part of that fuel duty is to \”meet our Rio committments\” in Ken Clarke\’s phrase as he brought in the fuel duty escalator. From the Stern Review we know what the climate change externality of the use of a litre of petrol is: 11p. The fuel duty imposed by the escalator on that same litre is some 23p.

The externalities are paid for, are included in market prices. And the externalities are paid for by the right people as well: the users who are creating the externalities.

We are, in fact, already doing what is being urged.

Oh, well done, well done!

Now the Soil Association, Friends of the Earth, GM Watch and two other non-Governmental organisations have written to the FSA in support of Prof Wynne.

In a letter to Lord Jeffrey Rooker, Chairman of the FSA, they complained that the dialogue is a \”silly waste of money\”.

\”As public interest groups who oppose the use of expensive, unproven and environmentally and socially damaging GM technology in farming and food, we do not intend to have anything to do with your GM assessment, and this £500,000 waste of public money, and we will encourage our supporters and others to avoid giving any spurious legitimacy to this exercise,\” it reads.

Since we\’re worried that you might actually dismiss our spurious claims we\’ve decided to pick up our ball and go home.

So Ner ner neh ner ner.

Observer editorial on BP

These people do infuriate at times:

Businesses, including BP, have the financial firepower to lead the green energy agenda and at the same time secure their own long-term economic gain.

Why do these nutters think that BP should be doing green energy?

BP is one of the great concentrations of a certain set of talents on the globe. Those talents are about the locating of, drilling for and transportation and refining of oil.

These talents are not transferable to windmills, fuel cells, tide machines, solar cells, electricity generation, electricity grids or any of the other renewable thingies we may desire or need.

Saying that because BP is in energy they must be in renewables is like saying that Airbus should make cars: it\’s all transport, innit? Or BT should run language courses: it\’s all communication, eh?

If we no longer need oil, thus no longer need the collection of expertise about oil which is what makes BP special, then we no longer need BP.

OK, bye bye then!

George Monbiot on Matt Ridley

They\’re all big enough and ugly enough to take care of themselves, but this George Monbiot review of Matt Ridley\’s new book, Ridley\’s response, The Bishop\’s comment and, well, my comment:

Pater Monbiot does seem to have wasted all that money he spent at Stowe, doesn\’t he? The lessons on playing the ball not the man doesn\’t seem to have taken. Nor does Balliol seem to have done much good if the point that ad hominem is a logical fallacy didn\’t sink in.

See, see, I told you so!

Almost all of it is money deemed to have been saved by reducing travel times. Business customers, it says, will save £17.6bn by getting there faster; leisure customers £11.1bn. Nowhere in the documents are these figures explained or justified. I spent the whole of Monday pressing the Department for Transport, asking for an explanation of how it converted time into money. The department spent eight hours of frantic searching to discover, just before 5pm, that it did indeed have a model, which it described as \”frightfully complicated\”.

Peoples\’ time does have a value and it\’s a value which should be included in estimations of the costs and benefits of a scheme.

If this is applied to high speed trains then it should also be applied to the time people have to spend sorting domestic waste…..

How to make us poorer

Dale Vince, the company’s founder, admitted that trying to generate solar power under England’s frequently grey skies was an inefficient way of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Even in the sunniest parts of England, the farms will generate a third less electricity than farms of the same size in southern Spain. However, Mr Vince said that the Government’s feed-in tariff scheme, which began last month, had made solar farms economically viable.

….

He said that solar panels were six times as expensive per unit of electricity generated as onshore wind turbines, which are themselves several times more costly than gas or coal plants.

Commenting on the subsidy available, Mr Vince said: “We don’t think [a feed-in tariff policy] is the best way to go but it’s here and rather than sit and sulk and say it shouldn’t be done, we are just going to get on and do it.

Sigh.

Sigh….economic growth and physical resources again at The Guardian

Might as well repeat the comment I left there:

Umm, as a scientist, isn\’t it sorta incumbent upon you to actually know what you\’re talking about?

\”The core problem is that the current modus operandi of global society is the production of goods and services sold for profit, with these profits subsequently reinvested in further production. Such limitless expansion, on a planet of finite material that can be transformed into usable resources, alongside limits to the processing of waste materials, is clearly impossible in the long term.\”

You\’ve entirely missed what we measure when we talk about economic growth (GDP for example) and what it means to make a profit. Neither of these things *necessarily* have anything to do with the physical limits of the world.

Both of them are about the creation of value. Value as perceived by the human beings doing the valuing. Yes, we might all think that sending a virtual red rose over Facebook is silly but those sending them (and presumably to some extent those receiving them) do value them. And that value is what we measure when we talk about GDP and it is the creation of that value that allows people to make profits.

There is absolutely nothing at all in the capitalist system, the free market one (these are two different things please note), the pursuit of profits or even continued economic growth that requires either the use of more limited physical resources or even the use of any non-renewable resource.

Indeed, technological advance and the profits and growth that come from it often mean a reduction in the use of those physical resources. Take the example of tantalum (some of which comes from that coltan which so excites people about the Congo….although only a very minor amount). Around 2000, 2001, there was a huge boom in the tantalum price as mobile phones really started to take off. The tantalum is necessary to make the capacitors….although there are substitutes like aluminium capacitors….one of the reasons the first phones were bricks is that Al capacitors take up a lot more room than Ta ones.

So what happened? Did we continue ripping up yet more parts of the earth to find the Ta to make more capcitors?

No, we didn\’t actually. Ta demand *fell* even as mobile phones went from hundreds of millions to billions around the world. Why? Because some bright people made a profit (how capitalist!) by working out how to add value (economic growth!) by miniaturising Ta capacitors. Instead of a gramme or two per capacitor we now use milligrammes of Ta per capacitor.

And this is both economic growth and profit achieved by *reducing* the scarce physical resources used.

Similarly, we get ever more efficient in our use of energy. By something like 1-2% each and every year. The amount of energy required to produce one unit of GDP (which, remember, is the value we add, not the resources we consume) declines by 1-2% each and every year. Has been for a century or more now.

Let us imagine the Green wet dream. All energy used is renewable, all physical resources are recycled. We would still have economic growth as people would still find new and interesting ways to add value to that energy and those resources which we do have. And there would still be profits for those who worked out those new and interesting ways.

In short, the physical world is not the constraint (it is a possible constraint, sure, but it is not *the* constraint) upon either profits or economic growth because neither profits nor economic growth depend upon the consumption of resources. They are dependent upon the addition and creation of value which is something quite divorced from the necessity of increased resource consumption.

I realise that I\’m just one of the plebs down here in the comments section but even a cat may look at a King. Could I suggest that as a Royal Society research fellow it is your duty, as a scientist, to go talk to some economists, you know, the experts in this subject, about your assumptions about matters economic?

So that, you know, you don\’t start making incorrect assumptions about the subject upon which to build towers of nonsense upon stilts?

The Dark Mountain Project

Latest from the eco-nutters:

Draw back the curtain, follow the tireless motion of cogs and wheels back to its source, and you will find the engine driving our civilisation: the myth of progress.

The myth of progress is to us what the myth of god-given warrior prowess was to the Romans, or the myth of eternal salvation was to the conquistadors: without it, our efforts cannot be sustained. Onto the root stock of Western Christianity, the Enlightenment at its most optimistic grafted a vision of an Earthly paradise, towards which human effort guided by calculative reason could take us. Following this guidance, each generation will live a better life than the life of those that went before it. History becomes an escalator, and the only way is up. On the top floor is human perfection. It is important that this should remain just out of reach in order to sustain the sensation of motion.

Recent history, however, has given this mechanism something of a battering. The past century too often threatened a descent into hell, rather than the promised heaven on Earth. Even within the prosperous and liberal societies of the West progress has, in many ways, failed to deliver the goods. Today’s generation are demonstrably less content, and consequently less optimistic, than those that went before. They work longer hours, with less security, and less chance of leaving behind the social background into which they were born.

Well, let\’s leave aside the factual inaccuracies of that last sentence….we all work shorter hours, have a great deal more security and greater social mobility than our forebears did, say, a century ago.

Look at what\’s really encapsulated there in that phrase \”the myth of progress\”. A myth is some phantasm, something that isn\’t real.

So, I guess we can strike these guys off the list of pregressives then, can we?

We are the first generations born into a new and unprecedented age – the age of ecocide. To name it thus is not to presume the outcome, but simply to describe a process which is underway. The ground, the sea, the air, the elemental backdrops to our existence – all these our economics has taken for granted, to be used as a bottomless tip, endlessly able to dilute and disperse the tailings of our extraction, production, consumption.

Ah, no, they don\’t understand economics, do they? The idea of a Commons, to which access must be limited when demand is greater than the ability of the Commons to regenerate, is hardly a new idea. It\’s hardly an unknown one either….half of last year\’s Nobel went to Elinor Olstrom who works on exactly how such limits can be and are self-organised within communities.

The last taboo is the myth of civilisation. It is built upon the stories we have constructed about our genius, our indestructibility, our manifest destiny as a chosen species. It is where our vision and our self-belief intertwine with our reckless refusal to face the reality of our position on this Earth. It has led the human race to achieve what it has achieved; and has led the planet into the age of ecocide. The two are intimately linked. We believe they must decoupled if anything is to remain.

We believe that artists – which is to us the most welcoming of words, taking under its wing writers of all kinds, painters, musicians, sculptors, poets, designers, creators, makers of things, dreamers of dreams – have a responsibility to begin the process of decoupling. We believe that, in the age of ecocide, the last taboo must be broken – and that only artists can do it.

Ecocide demands a response. That response is too important to be left to politicians, economists, conceptual thinkers, number crunchers; too all-pervasive to be left to activists or campaigners. Artists are needed. So far, though, the artistic response has been muted. In between traditional nature poetry and agitprop, what is there? Where are the poems that have adjusted their scope to the scale of this challenge? Where are the novels that probe beyond the country house or the city centre? What new form of writing has emerged to challenge civilisation itself? What gallery mounts an exhibition equal to this challenge? Which musician has discovered the secret chord?

Umm, riiiight. Luvvies to save the world then.

Against the civilising project, which has become the progenitor of ecocide, Uncivilised writing offers not a non-human perspective – we remain human and, even now, are not quite ashamed – but a perspective which sees us as one strand of a web rather than as the first palanquin in a glorious procession. It offers an unflinching look at the forces among which we find ourselves.

It sets out to paint a picture of homo sapiens which a being from another world or, better, a being from our own – a blue whale, an albatross, a mountain hare – might recognise as something approaching a truth.

Luvvies to save the world by teaching the animals to read apparently.

This, then, is Uncivilised writing. Human, inhuman, stoic and entirely natural. Humble, questioning, suspicious of the big idea and the easy answer. Walking the boundaries and reopening old conversations. Apart but engaged, its practitioners always willing to get their hands dirty; aware, in fact, that dirt is essential; that keyboards should be tapped by those with soil under their fingernails and wilderness in their heads.

We tried ruling the world; we tried acting as God’s steward, then we tried ushering in the human revolution, the age of reason and isolation. We failed in all of it, and our failure destroyed more than we were even aware of. The time for civilisation is past. Uncivilisation, which knows its flaws because it has participated in them; which sees unflinchingly and bites down hard as it records – this is the project we must embark on now. This is the challenge for writing – for art – to meet. This is what we are here for.

Well, at least uncivilisation still allows the use of that flowering of the late 20th century, the computer. Going to be interesting how they\’ll allow possibly the greatest globalised industry to survive in the promised Green wonderland.

This is the Dark Mountain project. It starts here.

Where will it end? Nobody knows. Where will it lead? We are not sure. In its next incarnation, in the not-too-distant future, it will become a website, which points the way to the ranges. It will contains thoughts, scribblings, jottings, ideas; it will work up the project of Uncivilisation, and invite all comers to join the discussion.

Then it will become a physical object, because virtual reality is, ultimately, no reality at all. It will become a journal, of paper, card, paint and print; of ideas, thoughts, observations, mumblings; new stories which will help to define the project – the school, the movement – of Uncivilised writing. It will collect the words and the images of those who consider themselves Uncivilised and have something to say about it; who want to help us attack the citadels. It will be a thing of beauty for the eye and for the heart and for the mind, for we are unfashionable enough to believe that beauty – like truth – not only exists, but still matters.

Aha! Finally I get it!

They\’re launching a poetry magazine!

Could have told us a few pages earlier guys….

We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our ?ngernails.

Apparently nailbrushes are verboeten though.

We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.

Snigger. As has been true of the lifestyle of every generation since the start of this civilisation thing. A result of that progress which you consider a myth, see?

Anyway, there we have it. This is the great new project, the Last Hope of Mankind. A literary magazine with no theories or ideologies tapped out on keyboards by unwashed hands.

Will you excuse me if I go back to planning how to get the stuff to make fuel cells work? Sounds more valuable really.