Iceland: Rise of the vigilantes

Over the past years I’ve come to notice a worrying trend here in Iceland. A trend that some people probably won’t dare to talk about publicly. I’m talking about vigilantism, something one certainly wouldn’t connect with Iceland.

On multiple occasions I’ve experienced that people here take the law into their own hands. It seems that many people don’t consider the measures or punishment executed by police and law as satisfactory.

And by vigilantism I’m talking about having certain people beaten up or threatened. If you piss off the wrong people, they will call somebody who will teach you a lesson.

I had one of my first experiences with this practice a few years ago, when my former boss and owner of the bar I worked at went bankrupt, cheated a lot of employees of their money and ended up owing a lot of people a lot of money. This shady guy “fell down the stairs.”

Another incident happened at another bar I used to work. Some drugged-up maniac went crazy attacking a few guests. So a few calls were made to ensure he wouldn’t ever come back. I can only imagine what that means.

And these cases are not exceptions.

If you become victim of any kind of injustice, it is not so difficult to find the culprit as Reykjavík (and anywhere else in Iceland) is a rather small and tight-knit community.

Somebody is harassing you, you call somebody to teach the thug a lesson. Somebody owes you money or stole your car? No matter if you need a debt paid or just revenge, all you need to do is make that call.

In public this vigilante practice is of course not accepted, but behind closed doors some people seek this form of extrajudicial punishment.

I argued about this with some Icelandic friends of mine as I am still shocked and appalled by this frontier justice every time I come across it. To me, taking the law into one’s own hands is just inappropriate, a relic of the Wild West, and I don’t find it acceptable for an advanced Western country like Iceland in the 21st century.

One should leave punishment up to the legal authorities.

My friends disagreed with me because the authorities never take the appropriate measures, according to them. “The police don’t do anything. They won’t help you” is an argument I’ve heard very often in the almost seven years that I’ve lived here.

It seems that many Icelanders don’t have any trust in their police or the legal system and therefore just “solve” their issues among themselves.

Granted, from my personal experience I can say that I do not have much faith in the Icelandic police either as they seem to be infuriatingly passive when it matters.

And talking about insufficient punishment—a few court decisions of late have caused public outcry such as the more than pathetic verdict by the Supreme Court in a case of sexual assault. Reading this article by Iceland Review guest contributor Herdís Helga Schopka shows perfectly why people feel let down by the legal system and why they feel like they need to take matters into their own hands.

I can really understand the wish for revenge (as petty as it may be) and the need for real justice.

But hiring a bunch of thugs to physically hurt somebody else cannot be the answer. I mean, this is Iceland (Iceland, the world’s most peaceful country with a very low crime rate) in 2013, for crying out loud, not some mafia infested, gun-slinging place.

I guess those vigilante methods are an inheritance of the Icelandic Viking ancestors.

Does the end justify the means?

By Katharina Hauptmann. This article first appeared in Icelandic Review here (htp: Nourishing Obscurity).

Reproduced with the kind permission of the author. All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy.

Nick Drew: Could our lights go out?

Read the first of Nick's superb new series on threats to our energy supply here.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Nick Drew: Could our lights go out?

Read the first of Nick's superb new series on threats to our energy supply here.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Securing Energy Supply (1)

When it comes to energy policy-making in the 21st Century, for most developed economies it is built around a 'triad' comprising these elements:

• environmental - reducing the detrimental impact of obtaining usable energy
• economic - delivering 'affordable' energy
• security of supply - delivering energy reliably
  

To state them as briefly as this is to skate lightly over huge complexities, but let us accept that we broadly know what is intended.

Attempts are constantly made to reconcile the three strands, since it is hard to see they can all be delivered at the same time - an issue sometimes referred to as the 'Energy Trilemma'.  We can have cheap, secure energy, but living near a 1970's vintage lignite-fuelled power station degrades and shortens your life.  We can have secure, low-carbon energy, but at tremendous cost.  We can have cheap, low-carbon energy but it may very well not be there when we need it.  The EU's official energy policy claims to square the circle (if a triad can do such a thing) - "fully balanced, integrated and mutually reinforced", claims the EC: but its reasoning is akin to that of the medieval schoolmen and the results not convincing at all.

(Charmingly, they have official nicknames for each leg of the policy triad - see the diagram: the environmental is called 'Kyoto' for obvious reasons; the economic is tagged 'Lisbon', after the conference and treaty of the same name that were intended to deliver competitiveness to the EU in every sphere; and the security moniker is 'Moscow' ... I wonder why ...)

Source:  European Commission

In this and following posts we focus on security, and consider mainly gas and electricity with some comments on oil.  There are two primary aspects: strategic security, against politically-motivated shortages; and day-to-day reliability.

Reliability was until recently not a matter that greatly exercised policy-makers in advanced economies.  Indeed, the enormous fundamental difficulties of continuously (and safely) supplying electricity, gas and oil had been so comprehensively solved, many had forgotten what an achievement it was.  Permanent access on demand to these three commodities - electricity in particular - has become essential to everyday existence, to the point where we cannot really countenance its interruption beyond the shortest of periods.

And permanent access is what we had become accustomed to, often forgetting that continuous supply of a commodity that is subject to all manner of complex contingencies, is a major practical challenge.  This challenge becomes all the greater when the commodity cannot readily be stored.  Compared to the relatively straightforward storage of (e.g.) coal or oil, the difficulty of storing natural gas is great; and of storing electricity very great indeed, almost to the point where we might say it cannot be stored (except in trivial quantities) unless one has access to large-scale hydro-electricity with pumped-water reservoirs - a privilege enjoyed by rather few of world's population.  But the engineers and markets are equal to the task, and the lights stay on.

If these problems have been so impressively solved, how then do we come to talk of reliability in the past tense ?  The new factor is wind-generated power, imposed on electricity systems by politicians responding (as they would see it) to lobbying by 'greens' for 'decarbonisation' of electricity in general, and by turbine manufacturers for wind turbines in particular.  We can fairly say 'imposed' because in almost every instance wind turbines cannot be justified economically per se (without recourse to a highly disputable case based on 'future avoided costs of CO2 emissions'), and thus only exist when installed by fiat and/or developers in receipt of large subsidies.

The characteristic feature of wind-power is 'intermittency', illustrated by the dismal long-term average output from windfarms which in most installations struggles to achieve 25% of its rated (notional) capacity.  If this 25% came in a predictable pattern - as, for example, does the equally low-performing solar power, which always peaks at midday - it could be accommodated fairly readily in a large electricity system.  However, in practice the pattern is near-random, with forward predictability of a few hours at best.

Yet electricity systems must be balanced continuously, and intermittent input in more than de minimis quantities is a challenge, growing ever greater as the amount of wind-power to be accommodated expands.  We considered the consequences of this in the two specific cases of Denmark and Germany in an earlier series of posts.  Summarising: through a combination of good engineering, access to hydro-electricity (in the case of Denmark), and throwing large amounts of money at the problem, to date these two countries have succeeded in accommodating large wind-generation sectors - but, in the case of Germany, only just.  Indeed, it is possible that Germany may be about to demonstrate dramatically the boundaries of what is feasible as regards wind-power: and it will be at levels of wind capacity a lot lower than many greens have hoped and promoted.

In any country or grid-region which must accommodate wind-power without having ready access to hydro, this serious challenge to reliability will persist until cheap and efficient power storage becomes a reality.  Such storage is as eagerly sought as any Holy Grail, but as yet is beyond us.  Thus, as the wind fetish shows little sign of abating in the corridors of power, reliability will become an ever-greater problem in electricity supply.  In some regional systems this might have knock-on consequences for gas reliability, if gas-fired power plant is called upon to meet ever more extreme wind-driven electricity-system balancing duties; but, by and large, gas grid operators (having at least some storage capability) have proven a match for this challenge and as yet, fears over gas security predominantly stem from strategic considerations.

It is to the strategic issues of energy security threatened by political factors that we turn next. 

[Continue to Part 2]

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Carbon Balls: don't pick on us for CO2 targets!

See the Energy Page for why the UK shouldn't lead the way in CO2 emissions reduction.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Carbon Balls: don't pick on us for CO2 targets!

See the Energy Page for why the UK shouldn't lead the way in CO2 emissions reduction.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Carbon Balls: crippling the UK economy with eco-nomics

David Rose's article in the Mail on Sunday shows how the proposed Energy Bill currently crashing its way through Parliament sets CO2 emissions targets that could kill off our manufacturing industry. And thanks to what looks like paid influence and bias in access to ministers, the Bill may succeed in becoming law.

But how big a "sinner" is the UK, compared to the rest of the world? Let's take a look.

The countries in the table below (click to enlarge) are responsible for three-quarters of gobal emissions, and (coincidentally, or not) the same proportion of nominal GDP:

(Data sources here and here.)

Let's graph some of the relationships. At 1.47% of the global total, the UK's emissions put it eleventh in the list:

 

You might expect some of the above because of differences in population numbers. But per person, we're still eleventh in the list:

 

 



Understood, nations have different patterns of energy use - and different mixes of energy source.

Perhaps we should look at the relationship between carbon emissions and GDP? Here's what we get when we divide column B by column G:

That puts us in fifteenth place. Maybe it's to do with how the importance of the service sector has increased in the mature (or declining) Western economies.

So far, I can't see a way to stack up the figures that proves why we should lead the way in reducing emissions. Perhaps Rose is right in linking the move to skillful - and dangerous - lobbying and PR.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.