Not enough O2 in the H2O?

Adam Nieman: "Global water and air volume" (Science Photo Library)

Professor Jason Box is continuing his research into the effect on Greenland snow melt of particulates from fossil fuel burning and forest fires, and this set me wondering about how much atmospheric oxygen is being locked up by the same processes.

O2 levels have varied radically during last 600 million years:

(from Wikipedia article "Atmosphere of Earth: Third Atmosphere")

- as corroborated by analysis of ancient gas bubbles trapped in amber.

Writing in the Guardian newspaper in 2008, Peter Tatchell said that research by Professor Robert Berner suggested "humans breathed a much more oxygen-rich air 10,000 years ago", though I can't track down the original statement and suspect Tatchell may have misunderstood. (A paper by Berner on oxygen in the Phanerozoic era can be read here.)

Tatchell appears to be on firmer ground voicing concerns about air quality in cities, though what's in the air is more worrying than what's absent, as this article from last month's Mail Online India edition says. That said, cities that are prone to temperature inversion layers (e.g. Los Angeles, Beijing) may find that not only is smog locked in, but oxygen not replenished from the surrounding area as fast as it is being consumed.

Globally, there seems to have been a very small decline in atmospheric oxygen since 1990, according to an 18-year longitudinal study by Dr Ralph Keeling. According to a post on the Climate Emergency Institute website, the decline is even less than Keeling had expected, and it's possible that increased CO2 is stimulating the growth of vegetation.

Certainly the self-styled "Rational Optimist" Matt Ridley claims greenery is increasing, but I am inclined to take his professional bullishness with a pinch of salt. Surface spread as seen by satellite misses the third dimension: the UN FAO estimates (2012 forest report) that forest cover has dropped by around a third in the last 10,000 years, and the loss has accelerated from an average of 360,000 hectares per year since civilization began, to 5.2 million annually over the last decade.

Which brings us back to the carbon dioxide-global warming debate. CO2 is a "greenhouse gas" but there are so many other factors affecting the Earth's surface temperature that I don't think anyone can say which way the thermometer is going to move. However, if the sea continues to warm up there is a danger that the level of dissolved oxygen in the oceans will be reduced. A study reported last year in Science Daily says that 15% of the seas are "dead zones" and suggests that an increase of a couple of degrees - as has happened since the end of the last Ice Age - can have significant effects. Again, industrial pollution and waste dumping exacerbate the damage.

http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Oxygen_Depletion


The Tatchell article also refers to a claimed 30% drop in oceanic oxygen-producing phytoplankton in the thirty years since 1980, though this is disputed. Even if true, our gas tank will keep us going for the foreseeable future: the Earth's atmosphere has a total mass of some 5 quadrillion (10¹⁵) tonnes, a fifth of which is oxygen. There's so much that the CEI article concludes "even when fossil fuel reserves (mostly coal) are exhausted, the maximum potential loss in oxygen is only small (Broecker, 1970)."

Further, as this 1994 paper by Duursma and Boisson says:

"Oxygen concentrations are ... the consequence of larger terrestrial and aquatic loops in which factors of temperature, light, nutrients and co2 play a role; for longer periods, elements such as sulphur and iron are involved. Hence the present level of 20.946 vol. % of atmospheric oxygen is merely temporary, and will change in the course of millions of years. The question of an optimum concentration for sustaining life on earth is equally time-dependent; but bearing in mind that these changes occur over periods of the order of millions of years, evolutionary processes are likely to keep pace with oxygen changes."

Those evolutionary processes may or may not have a place for humanity in the long run, but we have plenty more pressing threats to worry about. One of which is that the health and productivity (for us) of the seas may be compromised if warming continues and subsurface oxygen is depleted.

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.

Driverless trucks and their social implications

"Mish" reports on the development of automated trucks, with what appears to be econohawkish glee - oh, the savings we'll make.

But this will be replicated not just in blue collar jobs but the white collar middle class that until recently felt their college degrees and head-expertise insulated them from the uncertain and lower-paid employment of their socioeconomic inferiors. Even fund managers might easily be replaced by machines, as I understand arm-waving, shouty stock market traders are being right now.

The debates over State benefits and the redistribution of wealth are likely to become more lively in the years to come, and people who used to take one side may surprise themselves by crossing the floor.

Besides, when few have a job, how will the demand for goods and services be affected? Business owners need not be complacent, either.

Is the future in community policing and shopping at LIDL?

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.

Wood gas: energy efficiency and financial economy

The previous post on wood-burning motorcycles may seem jokey, though there were some 200,000 woodgas-burning vehicles operating in Northern Europe in WWII (see History section).

In terms of energy returned on energy invested (EROEI, or EROI), biofuels generally seem very poor:

(source: Wikipedia)

But as this site points out, wood gas has some advantages: "Converting biomass to a liquid fuel like ethanol or biodiesel can consume more energy (and CO2) than the fuel delivers. In the case of a wood gas car, no further energy is used in producing or refining the fuel, except for the felling and cutting of the wood. This means that a woodmobile is practically carbon neutral, especially when the felling and cutting is done by hand."

It can even make sense in the more elastic terms of money: the UN Forestry Department did a study in 1986 and looked at power generation for a sawmill, using wood waste generated on site so that there was no purchase cost. The savings were significant:

As the sawmill example shows, there is plenty of mileage in intelligent problem-solving at the local level, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. Long-term and big-picture planning are needed, but subsidies and other kinds of central government interference can skew cost-benefit analyses and result in misallocation of resources.

Of course, one could wonder why we zoom about so much in the first place:

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.

Peak bog rolls

As concern continues over future energy shortages, let's go back down Memory Lane to 1974...

January: bread and toilet rolls

September: sugar

... and, although we had about 1,000 years' supply in the UK, salt.

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.

London in the 1960s

See this Flickr collection - and contribute if you like. (htp: Dark Roasted Blend)

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.

Wood-burning motorcycle

htp: Dark Roasted Blend

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.

Update on bee deaths

According to Michael Snyder, about a third of US bees were wiped out this year. He goes on to discuss suspected causes and give a long list of important crops that require insect pollination.

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.

Peak Oil, EROEI and the Muffled Drum

An interesting thing happened last month. The Oil Drum, a well-regarded website + blog, announced it was ceasing operations and archiving itself for posterity. Well, everything has its day - we can all list blogs that were thriving a few years back but are no longer with us.

Some have suggested it was the extraordinary shale-based renaissance of US gas and oil production that did for the Drum. Probably not. But, fairly or unfairly, the Drum was associated with 'peak oil', which at its simplest is a view (or theory or doctrine or whatever) that global oil production - as a function of oil-in-the-ground - is doomed to peak, after which we start 'running out of oil'.

At its simplest, it is Malthusian hogwash. Of course, there are more nuanced versions than that, and the Drum shouldn't be tarred with the brush one would use for countering hogwash. Much more important is the concept of EROEI - energy return on energy invested, which has been another Drum favourite. And this concept really does bear careful consideration. Declining EROEI could be the end of civilisation as we know it for, in the immortal words of James Lovelock - "civilisation is energy-intensive". Better believe it.

So - no more drum-beat. But you'll not stop hearing about EROEI.


This post appeared first on the Capitalists@Work blog


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.

Are homicide and inequality inversely related?

http://www.libertarianprepper.com/the-sinister-roots-of-socialism/gini-index-usa/

 

 http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/htus8008.pdf

 

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.

Who's Who in the UK Government

See the full-sized list here (pdf).

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.

UK News media "among most corrupt in the world"

Transparency.org's 2013 interactive Global Corruption Barometer lists only 4 countries (out of 107) where the media are perceived to be among the most corrupt institutions: Egypt, Australia, New Zealand - and the UK.

Less surprisingly, political parties in about half of the 107 countries are also perceived to be corrupt. And that includes the UK.

Here, it's getting worse. When I first looked at Tranparency's surveys in 2008, the UK's overall perceived-corruption score had dropped from 8.4 the year before, to 7.7 (10 represented squeaky clean). The scoring is slightly different now - out of 100 - but for 2012 the British figure is 74, which I assume translates to 7.4 under the old system (the US scores 73).

Admittedly, these surveys are about the perception of corruption, and news-fed democracies may perhaps tend to be more cynical nations. But perceptions matter, and this decline in public trust, also shown in dwindling electoral turnouts, threatens the legitimacy and stability of our system of government.

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.

Interest rates will trigger the meltdown - Hugo Salinas Price

In King World News (2 August) Hugo Salinas Price alerts us to the threat of interest rate rises, which he describes as "fatal" and leading to worldwide "massive bankruptcies".

I'd known that derivatives are a huge market; what I hadn't realised was that the overwhelming majority of the contracts are related to interest rates.

The graph below is a visualisation of data from this Wikipedia article on the derivatives market:

Theoretically all the bets net off against each other, but we've seen what happens when a counterparty defaults (Lehman etc). Now consider that the annual GDP of the USA is only 3% of the notional value of interest rate contracts alone.

Frightening.

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.

Trees in the mist

Ronald Reagan is widely quoted as having said trees cause more pollution than automobiles do.

Not true of course, but not entirely without foundation either. Trees and other vegetation, particularly conifers, emit terpenes, aromatic chemicals whose generic name is derived from turpentine. The delightful aroma of pine resin in conifer woodlands comes from chemicals such as α-pinene and β-pinene.

Yet according to the National Physical Laboratory :-

• In addition to anthropogenic emissions, the earth’s natural vegetation releases huge amounts of organic compounds into the air.
• An estimated 1300 Tg C of terpenes a year are emitted, 10 times more than anthropogenic emissions.

 As far as climate is concerned, the NPL has this to say:-

• Terpene emissions are expected to rise sharply as global temperatures rise.
• As carbon dioxide levels increase, the earth will warm and higher levels of terpenes will be emitted.
• This will increase cloud formation, which will increase the optical thickness of clouds resulting in an increase in the reflection of sunlight back into space.
• Terpenes constitute a significant potential for feedback mechanisms in the climate.
• Terpenes also mediate the generation of ozone in the lower atmosphere.

 Dramatic stuff - even somewhat over-dramatic. Yet all this does not imply Reagan was correct because terpenes are not pollutants. They may be involved in the photochemical reactions which give that attractive haze over distant forests, but haze isn’t smog and doesn’t have the same effect on lungs and mucous membranes.

Without oxides of nitrogen from, for example vehicle exhaust emissions, tree terpenes alone would not cause the notorious photochemical smog which first appeared in Los Angeles in the 1940s and subsequently other large, sunny cities.

To my mind, this is why electric vehicles such as trams make sense in large cities, especially those where photochemical smogs are a problem. The issue isn’t CO2 emissions as many now seem to suppose, but old-fashioned air pollution such as oxides of nitrogen, unburned fuel and particulates. Sunlight just adds to the problem but that was there long before we decided to whizz around in metal boxes.

Electric vehicles are not pollution-free modes of transport of course. They are effectively powered by whatever is used to recharge their batteries, but any polluting effects are moved away from the city to the power station and subject to simpler and more stringent regulation.

Reagan pointed the finger at trees, climate alarmists point to CO2 and as so often a fog of dramatic misdirection hits the headlines.

Anthropogenic fog?

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.

World Tweet Like A Celeb Day!

Why wait to become famous to act like it? Let's make August 1st Tweet Like A Celeb Day and load up the Internet with our garbage.

Rules:

1. Tell everybody what you're doing, as often as possible - but only the unimportant stuff
2. Retweet everyone else's rubbish
3. No libel, insults etc

I have an extra rule, employed by the famous: to be a Twitter winner, you need at least as many followers as the number you follow. So I will only follow those who follow me, plus anybody who retweets my stuff.

Good luck!

UPDATE (2 Aug 2013)

Well, that was a damp squib! Mind you, I can't blame anybody, for I got bored talking about myself in very short order - how on earth do celebs manage it? So tiring.

On the plus side, at least one Twitter follower has delisted me, but I can't be bothered to find out who.

Who reads tweets anyhow? If you follow a lot of people then each message soon gets pushed lower down as the list lengthens. You'd have to be online practically all the time. Is this service tailor made for iPhone owners with OCD?

Thanks to Bill Quango and Paddington for their comments.

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.

Win a bottle of wine!

 

The above image is a snapshot of the Windows Media Player graphic accompaniment to the sound track of a BBC radio programme. A bottle of Somerfield red wine goes to the first person to guess the programme.

 

UPDATE (2 Aug 2013):

 

Nobody guessed, yet surely Media Player is a sound fingerprint! The answer is Count Arthur Strong, appearing on Mark Radcliffe's Radio 2 late-night programme in 2005.

 

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.

Coppola: Gold backing would destroy the US dollar

In a new article for Pieria, Frances Coppola argues that fixed currency systems can't cope with rapid change in the balance of international trade. Reverting to the gold standard would force the US to balance its books, but this would slam on the brakes so hard that a depression would ensue and foreign countries would have to find an alternative to the US dollar.

As matters stand, says Martin Armstrong, "The dollar is setting up to be the ONLY viable currency."

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.

Dark Snow

Back in February I did a piece  on World Voices about ice melt in Greenland, and linked to a blog by environmental scientist Jason Box. His theory is that the melting is accelerated by particle pollution from burning forests and fossil fuels - a fine layer of this soot settles on the ice and increases absorption of solar radiation.

Since then, the Guardian newspaper has picked up on the story (12 June 2013), and now he's featured in the current (31 July) edition of Rolling Stone magazine (subscription required), in an article by Bill McKibben entitled "The Ice Maverick".

The theory is comprehensible and plausible, whatever the debate about global warming generally. Professor Box is seeking crowdfunding for his research - please see the Dark Snow website 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.

Pencil and paper climate model

This post from Steve McIntyre is worth a look if you haven’t seen it. It’s a comparison of a simple pencil and paper climate temperature model published in 1938 with modern computer models.

Entertaining - but not so much when we recall how energy policies have been distorted by climate model projections.

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.

Fighting the Government for savers and against inflation (5)

In which token action is grudgingly promised:

MP to me, 14 July:

I accept that there are issues about access from time to time. I will write to the minister about this. The table office are very picky about how questions are put to ministers and normally edit them.

Would you please give me a reference to the comments from 1975?

Me to MP, same day:

With pleasure:

Hansard record of House of Commons debate, 10 July 1975:

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1975/jul/10/savings-index-linked-schemes

Mr. Neubert

Does the Minister accept that the opportunity to invest in inflation-proof schemes is an act of belated social justice to millions of people who have seen their savings irreversibly damaged during the recent rapid rise in the rate of inflation? Will he make recompense to many of them by easing up on his vindictive attacks on the principle of savings embodied in the capital transfer tax and the wealth tax?

§Mr. Barnett

The hon. Gentleman has put his supplementary question at the wrong time, because National Savings are rising very well at present. I am sure he will be delighted to hear that. As to what he called "belated social justice", I am sure he will pay due attention to the fact that the scheme was introduced by a Labour Government and not by a Conservative Government.

Mr. Nott

Is the Chief Secretary confident that a further extension of index-linked schemes—which are welcome to savers—will not cause a diversion of funds away from deposits with building societies, leading to a rise in the mortgage interest rate?

§Mr. Barnett

We are, indeed, aware of those problems. That is precisely why we introduced the scheme in this limited way.

Hansard record of House of Lords debate, 4 November 1975:

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/lords/1975/nov/04/national-savings-schemes

Lord LEE of NEWTON

My Lords, does my noble friend agree that while the index-linked schemes are extremely good value for money, it would be a good idea—as inflation has been rather rampant—to increase the maximum amount that can be invested in them?

§Lord JACQUES

My Lords, the Government have two conflicting obligations. One is an obligation to the taxpayer to buy goods and services as economically as possible, and secondly there are certain social obligations. The Government believe that by the action they have taken they have got the right balance.

MP to me, 22 July:

I will ask [my researcher] to put these points to the minister with the suggestion that a small number of index linked bonds should be made available with a limit as to how much any one person can hold.

My comments:

"... small number... limit..." - I don't understand the implicit attitude. Mr Hemming has no Treasury or economic brief in this Coalition; why so reluctant to protect savers against theft by inflation?

Also, no reply from the Telegraph journalist or either of the Treasury ministers, whom I Tweeted in Part 4.

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.

Bee deaths linked to pesticides - new study

"Pesticide exposure and pathogens may interact to have strong negative effects on managed honey bee colonies... We collected pollen from bee hives in seven major crops to determine 1) what types of pesticides bees are exposed to when rented for pollination of various crops and 2) how field-relevant pesticide blends affect bees’ susceptibility to the gut parasite Nosema ceranae."

Read all about it 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.

Strictly Confidential

After inedible rubber chicken skewers at the Brasshouse, we went to the matinee of Craig Revel-Horwood's "Strictly Confidential" at Birmingham's Symphony Hall. Led by the ebullient Lisa Riley, it gave us all permission to enjoy ourselves, a very underrated mission.

The over-bright wood panelling that usually reminds patrons of its existence throughout performances was black-curtained round the stage to set it for a properly theatrical experience. Lisa and the cast gave it plenty of welly, fighting the architecture and the natural reserve of us Midlanders. When played to a full house at night and in a traditional theatre it'll be a storm; as it was we loved it anyway.

Outrageous attack on soldiers' pensions

A soldier will miss out on almost £175,000 after his job was axed by defence bosses just 72 hours before he qualified for a full service pension.

Sergeant Michael Anderson, 35, was within three days of claiming a lifetime pension deal worth £261,278 for 18 years’ service.

He will now have to wait until he is 60 before receiving a package worth less than £90,000.

The case has fuelled suspicions that the Army, which is shedding 20,000 personnel in a cost-cutting exercise, is targeting those within touching distance of generous lifetime payments.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2377260/Army-axes-hero-days-short-pension-Sergeant-wait-hes-60-collecting-package-worth-90-000.html#ixzz2a2XTxzfH

Follow us: @MailOnline on Twitter | DailyMail on Facebook

By contrast...

There are separate arrangements for the pensions for the three great offices of state - the Prime Minister, Speaker of the House of Commons and Lord Chancellor. Under current legislation, they are entitled to a pension of half their final office-holder’s salary on leaving office, regardless of length of service.

House of Commons Standard Note SN 04586: "Pensions of Ministers and senior office holders" - last updated 27 March 2013

www.parliament.uk/briefing-papers/SN04586.pdf

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.

Quote of the... day?

".. allow me to remind you of Sibley's Law. Giving capital to a bank (said that worldly banker, Nicholas Sibley) is like giving a gallon of beer to a drunk. You know what will become of it, but you can't know which wall he will choose."

- Christopher Fildes, Spectator magazine, 15 December 2007

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 s-word

Click Green has a piece on the increased use of sustainable energy in the US. An increased use of natural gas is also mentioned, but the word shale is nowhere to be seen.

The s-word appears to be unwelcome in certain circles.

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.

Microalgae prove ideal for green facades | Arup | A global firm of consulting engineers, designers, planners and project managers

Microalgae prove ideal for green facades | Arup | A global firm of consulting engineers, designers, planners and project managers

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.

This new humanistic religion

If there be a saving way, at all, it is obviously this: Substitute health and happiness for wealth as a world-ideal; and translate that new ideal into action by education from babyhood up.

To do this, states must reorganise the spirit of education — in other words, must introduce religion; not the old formal creeds, but the humanistic religion of service for the common weal, the religion of a social honour which puts the health and happiness of all first and the wealth of self second. The only comfort in the situation is the curious fact that, underneath all else, the sociability inculcated in modern nations by quick communications and incessant intercourse is already tending toward the formation of this new humanistic religion.

The real and supreme importance of the League of Nations consists in its power of giving such a mood the first chance it has ever had in international affairs. For it must freely be confessed that, without this chance in international affairs, there is no hope that the mood will be adopted and fostered nationally.

John Galsworthy – Castles in Spain (1927)

In Galsworthy’s day many intelligent middle class people thought like this in spite and because of the Great War. They were not afraid to express their faith in a kind of universal secular bonhomie overseen by the benign gaze of the League of Nations.

How times have changed. The optimism of secular idealism has faded, its language tangled in caveats. Politically, secular optimism has become furtive, technical and rather weird.

Yet one Galsworthy phrase seems prescient to me, especially in the light of mass air travel and the internet: the sociability inculcated in modern nations by quick communications and incessant intercourse. Global sociability – maybe that’s our route to a more pragmatic optimism.

If so, then the stumbling block becomes obvious. Our political class has no wish to be sociable with the electorate because they don’t yet see us as their moral and intellectual equals, let alone their superiors.

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.

Market timing

Conventionally, we are told that market timing is impossible and that you'll miss short,sharp gains by staying out, etc.

But the market is no longer conventional. The swings have become much greater, there's all sorts of jiggery pokery behind the scenes (how is co-location legal?) and debt is a sword of Damocles over the whole system.

Rob Arnott at PIMCO (htp: Wall Street Ranter) recently contrasted US equities with emerging markets stocks, thus:

Reversion to the long-term US mean would involve a 29% drop  in value - and usually there's a significant overshoot. Let's not forget that the market has halved twice since the year 2000, and the recoveries seem to be down to monetary life support rather than healthy fundamental economic growth.

There's a San Andreas Fault running under this financial edifice. And the US market and economy are so large that a fall there would surely shake the foundations in other parts of the world.

Doubtless there are some traders who will make, are making, fortunes on short-term speculation, but the odds against outsiders managing to do it make the game one not to join.

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.

Does Monsanto engage in cyber warfare against its critics?

An article by Marianne Falck, Hans Leyendecker and Sylvia Miebrich published in Germany's Süddeutsche Zeitung on 13th July 2013 asks the question. Translation here:

http://sustainablepulse.com/2013/07/13/the-sinister-monsanto-group-agent-orange-to-genetically-modified-corn/#.UeMjl9LVB8F

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.

Arguing The Toss On Climate Change

Following hard on his purposeful assault on Michael Fallon two weeks ago, the redoubtable Andrew Neil had a go at Ed Davey this time around, and only peripherally on energy policy per se. His main thrust was an outright challenge to a simplified version of what one might call the warmist-scientific consensus. Of course, Neil is the better debater in every dimension than Davey - a Jesuitical novice could have mounted a better defence without raising his voice above a conversational level - but it's just a low-grade spectator sport with carefully-briefed sophistry on both sides. Taken at face value, there are rarely any knock-down points scored in such encounters, and I can't imagine many viewers changing their minds.

But points of interest still arise.

• The days when the Beeb's policy was for active suppression of climate-change skepticism are, it seems, over. (Davey was more than just called upon to defend his position: Neil made it clear that in his view, Davey had failed to do so.) That's not a trivial development. 
• Davey's principal fall-back arguments were (1) a Pascal's wager: even given uncertainty, it's still appropriate to insure against the downside of possible climate change (2) "a lot of our policies are 'no-regrets' policies" - we should be doing them anyway. 

Lots of people relish the fight over forecasts of temperatures - hockey-sticks at dawn - but I don't find that fruitful at all (go to Bishop Hill if you want to vent steam, though as one contributor says there, it can become a "back-slapping echo-chamber"). Better by far is a practical approach, where knock-down points can truly be scored. (1) and (2) above are perfect cases in point. Because it's trivial to demonstrate that current UK / EU policies don't represent any type of insurance policy against climate change: they don't even reduce CO2 emissions, thereby failing against even the most basic of their own criteria.

(The only thing that might represent insurance is adaptation and, as we know, UK expenditure on flood defences is pitiful.)

As for 'no regrets' policies, Minister, You Are Having a Laugh. Only self-financing, unsubsidised energy conservation measures and small-scale biomass / waste incineration could conceivably fall in this category: everything else is a massive gamble on rising gas prices - a huge speculative long. With our money.

At best, the other steps being taken might contribute to a bit of security of supply, and to Keynsian job-creation. But there would be cheaper and more effective ways of doing both. Nope, it isn't remotely difficult to paint the 'regret' scenarios.


This post first appeared on the Capitalists@Work blog


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.

PRISM follow-up: I was right

Last month I said about PRISM, "the FS is denying that GCHQ is breaking the law without denying that we have all our telecommunications spied on, thus confirming that the law here already permits what the Americans are doing."

Now it's official:

It has been alleged that GCHQ circumvented UK law by using the NSA’s PRISM programme to access the content of private communications. From the evidence we have seen, we have concluded that this is unfounded.
 
 We have reviewed the reports that GCHQ produced on the basis of intelligence sought from the US, and we are satisfied that they conformed with GCHQ’s statutory duties. The legal authority for this is contained in the Intelligence Services Act 1994.

 Further, in each case where GCHQ sought information from the US, a warrant for interception, signed by a Minister, was already in place, in accordance with the legal safeguards contained in the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000.

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.

Game of Drones

Hooray for Americans!

The farming and ranching town of Deer Trail, Colorado, is considering paying bounties to anyone who shoots down a drone.

Next month, trustees of the town of 600 that lies on the high plains, 55 miles east of Denver, will debate an ordinance that would allow residents to buy a $25 hunting licence to shoot down "unmanned aerial vehicles".

The measure was crafted by resident Phillip Steel, a 48-year-old army veteran with a master's degree in business administration, who acknowledges the whimsical nature of his proposal. But the expansion of drones for commercial and government use was alarming, he said.

"We don't want to become a surveillance society," he told Reuters in a telephone interview.

- http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/18/colorado-town-ponders-drone-bounty


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.

Diligent

When we want something done in daily life, from a haircut to a new house to a holiday, we prefer to deal with diligent people. Not so much diligent institutions, but diligent people.

The person who cuts our hair, the people who build our new house or those whose personal diligence makes a memorable success of our holiday – these are the people we want to deal with aren't they?

Diligent institutions? Possibly, but institutions are not what we prefer to deal with when things go wrong. We prefer people, yet so often institutions usurp the diligence of their people and substitute processes. We want diligent people – they want processes. Processes which are supposed iron out the vagaries of personal diligence, because people sometimes screw up.

So do institutions of course, but when they screw up their people can’t always draw on their own diligence to put things right. Most would like to I suspect, but can’t. It’s the rules, the tick boxes. Sometimes diligence seems to have been extracted from them by the corporate machine and thrown away.

I’m reminded here of an issue I once had with my father’s gas bill. He paid by direct debit but suddenly received a bill for over £5000 and naturally I was keen to sort it out for him. On day one I got nowhere with corporate robots at the gas supplier, but overnight it snowed heavily and many people couldn’t get into work.

So I phoned the gas supplier again the following morning and spoke to a very pleasant lady who knew immediately that there had been a problem when my father changed supplier. She sorted it all out in no time. In fact it turned out that the supplier owed my father a refund because his direct debit was set too high.

I’d realised that anyone diligent enough to make it into work through the snow would be a better bet for sorting out my father's absurd bill and so it proved. I made a particular point of thanking her and she was pleased to have helped. Of course she was – being diligent.

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.

Fighting the Government for savers and against inflation (4)

We have new, again not wholly satisfactory, replies from the Treasury:

 

MP's covering letter (dated 10 July 2013):

 

"Please see enclosed the response from the treasury regards the two Parliamentary Questions which you requested be put to the Treasury.

 

"I trust that the answers are of interest."

 

My comments:

 

1. One of my questions has been materially altered and this has destroyed a vital point, namely, the moral case for protecting the value of savers' deposits - an argument that was clearly accepted when Index-Linked Savings Certificates were introduced in 1975.

 

2. The answers are certainly "of interest" (I have to hope that the MP is being ironic) as both fail to resolve one or more substantive issues in the questions as originally proposed.

 

FIRST QUESTION

 

My version:

 

"Is the [Minister/PM] aware that National Savings Index-Linked Savings Certificates were introduced in 1975 as a form of social justice to savers affected by inflation, as is made clear by exchanges in this House on 10 July 1975, and will he now instruct NS&I to make them permanently available again without further delay?"

 

Version as put to Minister:

 

"To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, if he will instruct National Savings and Investments to make National Savings index-linked savings certificates permanently available to savers with immediate effect."

 

Treasury written answer, from Mr Sajid Javid MP (08 July 2013):

 

"National Savings and Investments (NS&I) purpose is to provide cost-effective debt financing to the Government by issuing and selling retail savings and investment products to the public.

 

"In meeting this objective NS&I follow a policy balancing the interests of their customers, the taxpayer and the stability of the wider financial services market. In line with this remit NS&I do not anticipate new sales of Index-Linked Savings Certificates this year."

 

My comments:

 

It is particularly disappointing that the reference to proceedings in Parliament was excised, because they show that the Government and the Opposition accepted the MORAL case for protecting the value of savers' money. I had thought the editing was done by the MP, but he seems to be suggesting that it was done by the officials who handle the questions submitted.

 

I have Tweeted Mr Javid:

 

 

From the Daily Telegraph, 15 March 2010:

 

"NS&I Index-linked Savings Certificates are also known as Inflation-Beating Savings and are designed to give savers a guaranteed tax-free rate of return, higher than the rate of inflation measured by the Retail Prices Index (RPI), if held for the full certificate term.

"The certificates were launched in 1975 and were initially available exclusively to pensioners as a way of protecting their savings against high inflation. In 1981 the exclusivity of the certificates was dropped and they were made available to all savers."

And from Part 1 of this series on my blog, an extract from my email to my MP (03.03.2013):

May I also draw your attention to two passages in Hansard from 1975 that make it perfectly clear that Government recognises the moral obligation to protect the value of savers' money?

Hansard record of House of Commons debate, 10 July 1975:

Mr. Neubert

 

Does the Minister accept that the opportunity to invest in inflation-proof schemes is an act of belated social justice to millions of people who have seen their savings irreversibly damaged during the recent rapid rise in the rate of inflation? Will he make recompense to many of them by easing up on his vindictive attacks on the principle of savings embodied in the capital transfer tax and the wealth tax?

 

§Mr. Barnett

 

The hon. Gentleman has put his supplementary question at the wrong time, because National Savings are rising very well at present. I am sure he will be delighted to hear that. As to what he called "belated social justice", I am sure he will pay due attention to the fact that the scheme was introduced by a Labour Government and not by a Conservative Government.

 

Mr. Nott

 

Is the Chief Secretary confident that a further extension of index-linked schemes—which are welcome to savers—will not cause a diversion of funds away from deposits with building societies, leading to a rise in the mortgage interest rate?

 

§Mr. Barnett

 

We are, indeed, aware of those problems. That is precisely why we introduced the scheme in this limited way.

 

Hansard record of House of Lords debate, 4 November 1975:

Lord LEE of NEWTON

 

My Lords, does my noble friend agree that while the index-linked schemes are extremely good value for money, it would be a good idea—as inflation has been rather rampant—to increase the maximum amount that can be invested in them?

 

§Lord JACQUES

 

My Lords, the Government have two conflicting obligations. One is an obligation to the taxpayer to buy goods and services as economically as possible, and secondly there are certain social obligations. The Government believe that by the action they have taken they have got the right balance.

 

SECOND QUESTION

 

My version:

 

"Will the [Minister/PM] give a guarantee on behalf of the British Government that savings covered by the terms and limits of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme will be fully protected against ad hoc restrictions of access, bank bail-ins and other forms of expropriation or forced conversion?"

Version as put to Minister:

"To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, whether savings covered by the terms and limits of the Financial Services Compensation Scheme are protected against (a) ad hoc restrictions of access, (b) bank bail-ins and (c) other forms of expropriation or forced conversion."

Treasury written answer, from Mr Greg Clark MP (09 July 2013):

"The Financial Services Compensation Scheme (FSCS) provides protection for deposits up to £85,000 per depositor, per authorised institution."

My comments:

I have tweeted Mr Clark:

We have seen that savers in Cypriot banks originally faced partial loss of even their insured deposits. Now the proposal is to convert some of account amounts above 100k Euro into bank shares, and some of the rest is to be lost or frozen or ineligible to receive interest.

But it doesn't stop at Cyprus. A Russian journalist, Valentin Katasonov, sees this as a global trend towards "Open Bank Reconciliation", and there is now Europe-wide agreement on making not only bondholders but depositors pay the cost, as Bruno Waterfield reported in the Telegraph.

Here in the UK, the Bank of England has set up a "Special Resolution Unit" for failing banks; the SRU Director Andrew Gracie gave a speech to the British Bankers' Association (pdf) in September 2012, outlining what might happen and how it would be carried out and the media coverage appropriately managed. Among the public announcements he envisages (pp. 4-5) are:

"any insured depositors would be fully protected - as is always the case; and [...] the final extent of creditor write-downs, and rates of conversion to equity."

Now, an ideas speech to bankers is not a binding commitment or a statement of official policy. If push comes to shove, can we be absolutely sure that some of our "insured" money won't be frozen, or compulsorily swapped for shares in a bank of established dubious quality? This is why we need very specific assurances - or to get our money out.

If that last sounds alarmist, note the rumour on John Ward's blog, that JP Morgan is now sending people into Portugal to help big investors get their cash out of the country ahead of a bank bail-in there. And Barclays is among several banks recently downgraded by S&P.

The issues may soon turn out to be far more than merely theoretical.

UPDATE

The following email exchange with the MP today may be of interest.

Me: Thank you for your letter and enclosures of 10 July. I assume that your concluding remark about the answers being "of interest" is tinged with irony. I have Tweeted the Treasury ministers concerned to get more relevant, more specific replies.

He: What they are basically saying is that they don't want to issue any more index linked debt at the moment. They are also saying the 85K is safe.

Me: I understand that. Please don't think that you're the only grammar-school-educated boy in South Birmingham. I also have a degree in English from Oxford.

My point - and it would have been clearer if you hadn't edited out one of the most important parts - is that it is not only my view that they are morally obliged to offer index-linked securities, but the view of the Government that introduced them in 1975, and also that of the Opposition at that time.

As to "safety", this too needs clarification. Argentinian depositors' money was safe during the 2001 corralito, but it wasn't accessible.

I am on Day 398 of this enquiry via yourself and think it might be better if we pursued the case in parallel from now on.

FURTHER UPDATE

Let's see if the Press can help. Andrew Oxlade at the Telegraph called for a return of "Thatcher bonds" back in April, now I've Tweeted him:

___________________________________

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.

Sceptical journey

When apocalyptic climate science appeared on the public stage, I initially took a fairly neutral view of it. As a professional environmental scientist I assumed that the science would at least be fairly rigorous even if the apocalyptic predictions might be exaggerated by journalists.

Hints that all was not well appeared on my radar via two letters in Chemistry In Britain which in 2004 became Chemistry World, the member's magazine of the Royal Society of Chemistry.

Letter 1 was from a professor of physical chemistry. He accused climate scientists of misusing the Stefan-Boltzmannconstant. He went on to claim that there was also no credible physical theory of how CO2 might control the thermal properties of the whole atmosphere. I won’t go into the details, but what surprised me about the professor’s letter was how easy it was to check that he appeared to have a good point – at least as far as I could see.

However, more extensive reading allayed my suspicions somewhat. Climate scientists had built mathematical models of how CO2 might indeed exert control over the thermal characteristics of the atmosphere. However...

Letter 2 was from a qualified scientist who asserted that criticisms of mainstream climate science should not be published as the science was 95% likely to be correct and of apocalyptic importance. This, so the letter asserted, was sufficient reason to suppress sceptical voices.

I’m relying on memory here because at that time I didn’t know I’d begun an interesting scientific journey. However, I well remember being quite shocked by letter 2. Not good whatever one might think of climate science, especially in a magazine for professional scientists.

These two letters were published quite a few years ago and it took most of the intervening years for me to conclude that there is indeed a serious problem with mainstream climate science. I’m not advocating one-sided scepticism here by the way – this is merely an outline of my personal journey of discovery.

Eventually I resigned from the Royal Society of Chemistry. In my resignation letter I mentioned obvious but ignored hints of malpractice in climate science, but didn’t make a big deal of it.

Why not? Well by then I’d retired and become thoroughly bored with the pusillanimous way institutions are led by the nose when it comes to matters of official policy. I’d done more than enough background reading to know there was certainly a major scandal behind apocalyptic climate predictions.

Once I had learned to be sceptical about the apocalyptic message, where did I place the blame? It’s a complex issue, but some climate scientists journalists, politicians, activists and self-serving businesses must all take the credit for jumping on a bandwagon and downplaying major uncertainties in our knowledge of how and why the climate changes.

Do your own research, be guided by behaviour, find people you trust and be guided by their manner and their scepticism. As always, the important clues are to be found in human behaviour - that was my climate lesson.

As scientists or non-scientists we have to build our own web of trusted opinion and reliable information. During the peace and quiet of a snowy winter evening perhaps? Before the lights go out?

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.