All most offsetting – land developers and nature conservation

Environment Secretary Owen Paterson posted a cheery piece on biodiversity offsetting on the BusinessGreen website this week[1].  It’s a masterclass in positive propaganda - teachers, get your students to highlight all the whoopee phrases.

Essentially, if some developer can’t unleash his yellow bulldozers because Gussie Fink-Nottle has identified a rare newt on the site, then shift the dem’ thing. “Biodiversity offsetting can ensure that they recreate the same or even a better environmental site somewhere else.”

There’s a tiny tinkle of worry about that “can”. A more balanced and informative briefing is on the Parliamentary website[2], which recognizes that “badly planned offsets could result in a loss of biodiversity by allowing inappropriate development to proceed, or by compensating inadequately” and makes reference to the Business and Biodiversity Offsets Programme, whose Advisory Group includes a number of respected conservation organisations[3].  Friends of the Earth are against, the Woodland Trust is wary, as Thursday’s Guardian’s “licence to trash nature” piece shows[4].

Paterson says the Environment Bank supports the scheme. It would, as becomes clear when you look at their site[5]: “The Environment Bank Ltd (EBL) is the leading trader in the UK in environmental assets (natural capital stocks), enabling and brokering deals between buyers (developers, corporate, investors) and sellers (landowners, farmers, conservation bodies, land management companies), thereby facilitating new markets to substantially increase investment in the natural environment.” Ultimately, the EU’s behind it, as the passage goes on to say: “At EU level, the European Commission is currently developing policy for a ‘no net loss initiative’ scheduled for 2015.”

The Environment Secretary paints a rosy picture of compensation with (possibly) bigger or better alternative land. “Bigger” is easy to understand, but it’s not obvious what “better” will mean in every case – microclimates and local ecosystems are very subtle; even “similar” could be a challenge.

DEFRA is consulting us until 7 November[6]. Naturally, to hear is not the same as to obey, but silence betokeneth consent, as Sir Thomas More reminded the court.

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[1] http://www.businessgreen.com/bg/opinion/2293143/biodiversity-offsetting-a-chance-to-improve-the-environment-and-grow-the-economy

[2] http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/postpn_369-biodiversity-offsetting.pdf
[3] http://bbop.forest-trends.org/pages/advisory_group
[4] http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/sep/05/biodiversity-offsetting-proposals-licence-to-trash
[5] http://www.openness-project.eu/node/7
[6] https://consult.defra.gov.uk/biodiversity/biodiversity_offsetting

 

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Syria: yet another pipeline, yet another enemy

David Malone looks at Qatar's interest in extending the Arab Pipeline (not to be confused with the TransArabian Pipeline) through Syria into Turkey.

What a curse oil and gas have been. US, Israel, Russia, Egypt, Turkey, the Muslim Brotherhood vs.  other Islamic sects and political parties... how could anyone keep on his feet in a boat everyone is rocking?

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US complicity in Syrian chemical attack?

"Yossef Bodansky [...] was, for more than a decade, the Director of the US House of Representatives Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare," says the bio on OilPrice.com. His 28 August article states that US intelligence was involved in meetings with Syrian opposition forces before the 21 August chemical weapon detonation that has been blamed on the Syrian government.

"Initial meetings between senior opposition military commanders and representatives of Qatari, Turkish, and US Intelligence [“Mukhabarat Amriki”] took place at the converted Turkish military garrison in Antakya, Hatay Province, used as the command center and headquarters of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and their foreign sponsors. Very senior opposition commanders who had arrived from Istanbul briefed the regional commanders of an imminent escalation in the fighting due to “a war-changing development” which would, in turn, lead to a US-led bombing of Syria."

The link to the OilPrice.com article comes via the August Corbett Report video, republished on The Tap blog.

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Oil, gas and Syria

Mike Shedlock repeats his strong suspicion that the impending incursion into Syria is to do with oil. He illustrates this with a German map of the Transarabian Pipeline which also appears on Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Arabian_Pipeline



Apparently written in 2008, the Wiki article says that the line ceased operation in 1990 and "Today, the entire line is unfit for oil transport."

 

But things may have moved on since then. There is another line to note, the Kirkuk-Banias Pipeline:




http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkuk%E2%80%93Baniyas_pipeline

This too has been out of service for some time, but in 2010 Iraq and Syria "agreed to build two new Kirkuk–Baniyas pipelines" for heavy and light oil." It has been said that President Assad saw this as part of a "Four Seas" strategy to become a key link between the East and the Mediterranean.

Martin Armstrong says that Assad has been blocking the Nabucco gas pipeline, the West's counter to Gazprom's tendrils in Europe:

 

http://www.economist.com/node/14041672

But there's also the question of not putting all your eggs in one basket. The proposed Nabucco pipeline route in the above 2009 Economist Magazine map runs from Kurdish areas via a semicircle though Erzerum and on to Ankara and Europe, giving Turkey control of additional vital energy supplies.

It's possible that the West has seen Syria not so much a threat, or obstacle, as an opportunity to diversify supply lines.

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Belief in experience

I’m not a close follower of Santayana’s philosophy, not making much use of his ideas on modes of being for example. Yet I greatly admire his wisdom, his elegant insights into the human situation.

Take this quote for example:-

Belief in experience is the beginning of that bold instinctive art, more plastic than the instinct of most animals, by which man has raised himself to his earthly eminence : it opens the gates of nature to him, both within him and without, and enables him to transmute his apprehension, at first merely æsthetic, into mathematical science.

This is so great a step that most minds cannot take it. They stumble, and remain entangled in poetry and in gnomic wisdom.

Science and reasonable virtue, which plunge their roots in the soil of nature, are to this day only partially welcome or understood. Although they bring freedom in the end, the approach to them seems sacrificial, and many prefer to live in the glamour of intuition, not having the courage to believe in experience.

George Santayana - Scepticism and Animal Faith

For me, a key phrase here is not having the courage to believe in experience. Surely it does require courage to believe in experience – often considerable courage.

What Santayana does so extraordinarily well is draw our attention to it without the need to illustrate his meaning. He writes as if he is fully aware that there will be those who know just what he means and those who don’t. He isn’t writing for the latter group.

Maybe we experience told him there was no point and he had the courage to write on that basis. After all, the courage to believe in experience isn’t something easily instilled in others merely by words. Santayana knew he wasn’t likely to stiffen the rational backbone of anyone lacking this most necessary brand of intellectual courage.

Science and reasonable virtue, which plunge their roots in the soil of nature, are to this day only partially welcome or understood.

Indeed - they still are.

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.

Decision time for America - and the free world

“By 930, most arable land had been claimed and the Althing, a legislative and judiciary parliament, was initiated to regulate the Icelandic Commonwealth [...] The Commonwealth lasted until the 13th century, when the political system devised by the original settlers proved unable to cope with the increasing power of Icelandic chieftains.” - Wikipedia on Iceland

And the implication for the USA?

Say 930 = around 1910, 13^th century = 21^st century.

Karl Denninger fulminates on the illegality of mortgage transfers into those bundled swindle-packages - and the banks could still win anyway. Jesse reflects on Frank Church's warning from 1975 that the nation could head into a spy-ridden society, and it has; and John Kerry says war can now be declared without Congressional approval, though that is still being sought.

You will have the rule of law, or the rule of persons. You will be citizens, or subjects. You will be safeguarded by a Constitution, or ravaged by untrammeled power.

This is the three-century decision point.

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.

FACT: dragons really do exist

"A.D. 793. This year came dreadful fore-warnings over the land of the Northumbrians, terrifying the people most woefully: these were immense sheets of light rushing through the air, and whirlwinds, and fiery dragons flying across the firmament."

 

- The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

 

In mythology, there are dragons or wyrms, but also two-legged or legless, poisonous or fiery wyverns, or lindworms. I have seen long ago but cannot now find on the Internet an engraving, possibly sixteenth century, of one of the latter, destroying whole villages with its fiery breath. I wondered then how someone could dare invent something on that scale, so disprovable.

 

And then on St Valentine's Day 2013 (or 15th February, depending on the time zone you were in at the time), one visited Chelyabinsk.

 

This time the evidence was direct and undeniable, not merely reconstructed with an artist's imagination. According to James Higham, Russians commonly drive with dashcams because of the risk of fake, compensation-seeking "accidents" like this. And so at last we got the proof, for the world to see.

 

Down it flew, a long, fiery shape with a snake-like body and no legs, its deafening roar sufficient to blow in windows and doors and knock down walls, the flames of its breath bright enough to cast shadows. Had it not landed in an ice-covered lake, but hit solid ground, the destruction would have been enormous, as it had been a century ago in Tunguska.

 

Here be dragons.

 

Images taken from this video compilation, and this.

 

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.