Energy efficiency: method vs. objective

Alzetta's petrol-driven mechanical horse (Pic: http://cyberneticzoo.com/?p=2595)

Is our thinking radical enough? Imagine if all we had done in the twentieth century was to replace living horses with mechanical ones to pull carts and waggons.

Similarly, making internal combustion engines more efficient and cleaner is good, but this still focuses on cars as a method rather than re-examines what they're for. ATOC reckons rail is better:

"... on average, passenger rail currently emits approximately half the carbon dioxide per passenger kilometre of cars and around a quarter that of domestic air... This analysis is based on average figures. Quite clearly, in any specific example, the occupancy of the vehicle is key. A fully-loaded car will perform well on a CO2 per passenger km basis compared to the most efficient train with very few people in it. Similarly the averages quoted here cover a range of traffic conditions and may well differ from those of individual operators running specific services. Nonetheless these average figures clarify the starting position. Further work is needed to consider the effect of practical policy options open to us to reduce emissions from transport."

Shame about Beeching, then; and about the way that rail travel has become so expensive on certain routes. Privatisation may have helped certain entrepreneurs and (indirectly) some politicians, but there was nothing much wrong with the old transport system in Birmingham in 1975, and the lower level of car ownership then. Now, some of my young colleagues prefer to run a car instead of building a pension and saving up to buy a house - this DM article says that lower earners can be paying 27% of their disposable income in this way.

On the other hand, there is a welcome new realism about "green transport" in the air. This week there will be an EU vote in Strasbourg on revising targets for the contribution of biofuels to energy production, as London MEP Mary Honeyball explains. This is, it seems in response to growing awareness of the impact of corn ethanol production on food prices; plus the relative expensiveness of alternative fuels. The EC Commissioner for Energy Günther Oettinger also admits that electric vehicles will contribute less to the solution than previously expected (see this video at 1:20 in).

Rather than design better mechanical horses, it would help more if we and our stuff were in the right places to start with. To quote Douglas Adams, one of the finest philosophers of the twentieth century:

"Bypasses are devices that allow some people to dash from point A to point B very fast while other people dash from point B to point A very fast. People living at point C, being a point directly in between, are often given to wonder what's so great about point A that so many people from point B are so keen to get there, and what's so great about point B that so many people from point A are so keen to get there. They often wish that people would just once and for all work out where the hell they wanted to be."

Many of our current solutions are a sort of Marie Antoinette washed-sheep playing with a fantasy version of reality; alternative technologies can be cute and clean without really being green.

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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.

Davy Jones' garbage

Look beneath your lid some morning,
See those things you didn't quite consume
The world's a can for
Your fresh garbage . . .

Spirit - Fresh Garbage[1] [2]

I loved that song when I first heard it in 1968, on the compilation LP “The Rock Machine Turns You On”[3] – Jay Ferguson’s distant, lost-sounding, disillusioned tenor voice, perfect for the teenager in turmoil.

It’s still relevant, and the biggest rubbish bin of all is the sea. A lot of this is plastic, not only on shores, where it represents 60% – 80% of all litter (Derraik, 2002[4]) but in vast swirling oceanic garbage patches[5] - and on the sea bed: in 1995 92% of debris on the floor of the Bay of Biscay was plastic[6]. A more recent article by Greenpeace says 70% of plastic litter sinks, and there is an estimated 600,000 tons of it at the bottom of the North Sea.[7]

The debris is unsightly, and can strangle or fill the stomachs of marine wildlife. It’s also toxic, so developing biodegradable versions doesn’t solve the problem – indeed, it could make it worse, since dissolved plastic is much harder to find and nearly impossible to remove.

James Higham posts a picture[8] of a cleanup device still under development. It’s a giant static filter that the inventor, Boyan Slat, hopes will trap surface garbage but allow plankton to pass safely through; work continues.[9] But even if it works perfectly, that still leaves the other, sunken 70% to deal with. Yet again, techno-fixes have limitations.

I can remember when we had shopping baskets and produce wasn’t shrink-wrapped. Will those days ever come again?

 

---

[1] http://www.metrolyrics.com/fresh-garbage-lyrics-spirit.html

[2] http://youtu.be/k7MQ5rxUZsc

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rock_Machine_Turns_You_On

[4] http://www.caseinlet.org/uploads/Moore--Derraik_1_.pdf

[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Marine_garbage_patches. There are in fact more than three of them, as the articles go on to explain.

[6] Derraik, Table 1 (see note 4).

[7] http://www.greenpeace.org/international/en/campaigns/oceans/pollution/trash-vortex/

[8] http://nourishingobscurity.com/2013/09/09/plastic-gobbler-of-the-seven-seas/comment-page-1/#comment-221633

[9] http://www.boyanslat.com/plastic5/

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Honey traps

I like honey, so I tend to notice honey-related stories and it is surprising how much skulduggery there is in the world of honey. Take these comments from the head of a Derbyshire supplier.

"The honey industry is used to launder money, with people buying large quantities and then selling it at a loss. In the past, I've been offered payment of substantial bills with plastic carrier bags full of cash," said Tony.

He said: "There is a lot of cheap foreign product on the shelves, claiming to be honey. One retailer in Derby has a product on the shelves that is so cheap that by the ton it would cost £12,500. For 20 tonnes of unrefined product in a 40ft container the price would be £13,000 so the prices I see on the shelves are a physical and financial impossibility.

I know 70 tonnes of unlabelled synthetic honey is imported into the UK but I've never seen synthetic honey on sale and it can't just vanish into thin air," said Tony.

He has experienced problems with corruption in Italy and Greece and does not deal with either nation. He said: "In Greece, you can pay for official paperwork to certify your honey is whatever you say it is and this is what we're up against.”

It’s obviously a tough business because this same supplier’s name appears in an Australian article on fake Manuka honey. I've bought honey from this guy and suspect he was the victim of yet another honey scam.

In October 2011, Britain's Food and Environment Research Agency (FERA) tested a small sample of five brands of manuka honey from shop shelves. Only one, made by Comvita, was up to standard. The other four (from Nelson Honey, Honeyco Rainforest, Littleover Apiaries and Native New Zealand Manuka Honey) showed no detectable "non-peroxide activity", the anti-bacterial properties special to manuka honey.

Of course the issue of chloramphenicol in Chinese honey has been rumbling on for some time and still appears to be a source of concern.

How to detect fake honey? This article dating all the way back to 2007 has some simple tests, including one extraordinary piece of advice.

When poured very slowly honey will flow as a spiral in a clockwise direction. This is because the honey molecule is non-symmetrical with a right-hand bias which causes the stream of honey to spin.

Complete nonsense of course.

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.

How to price the British housing market?

http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/11/global-house-prices
 

The Economist magazine published an interactive tool at the end of last month, to show what's happened to house prices since 1975. They say that (thanks to Osborne's vote-buying house purchase schemes) "the British market is picking up even though its fundamentals—unlike America’s—suggest continued overvaluation."

This is just fun with statistics. Prices "in real terms" may change when food and fuel get more expensive and "average incomes" ignores widening regional and income-group disparities.

I have also suggested before now that we don't have a housing shortage, we have a housing misallocation. Rents would be lower if we had some properly enforced policy on economic immigration. And there is the vexed question of all those spare bedrooms - "taxing" them hits families that don't have it easy, yet very many old people are clinging on to property that's dauntingly difficult and expensive for them to look after (my wife's grandmother hadn't been able to go upstairs for decades).

But thanks to the fragmented family, people are less likely to take in their elderly relations. I know a doctor who, when a chap wanted to complain about how his old 'un was being looked after, agreed enthusiastically and offered to have the ambulance follow the chap home so she could be safely installed into his loving care; gosh, how fast the complaint went away!

Inflation is a matter of choosing A and B and comparing them. Unless Osborne plans to imitate Rudolf Havenstein then his (and the supposedly independent BoE's) pumping has to stop, probably after the 2015 General Election. My guess is that except for "hot spots", house prices will decline in cash terms, especially as unemployment and underemployment continue to undermine the workforce.

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John Ward: Co-op and TSB customers should seriously consider switching

John Ward looks at the split of TSB from Lloyds Bank and suggests TSB customers should get out - as well as Co-op customers, who look set for a "haircut".

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Damascus gas attack - "children were killed earlier by jihadists"

Syria: it's alleged that the children dying of gas poisoning in Damascus were in fact Alawites kidnapped by the jihadists - and that they were killed before the 21st August event.

(htp: Tap blog)

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Arctic freeze, Greenland melt

David Rose writes again in the Mail on Sunday, reporting a 60% increase in North Polar ice cover. Ha ha! That's one in the eye for all you global warming experts, etc.

On the other hand, Professor Jason Box continues his Dark Snow researches in Greenland and finds that the melting continues as predicted. About half of it, he thinks, is down to reduced albedo [index of light reflection] because of a soot layer from the burning of fossil fuel and forest, but there are other factors, too, including a secondary partial-melt effect that causes ice crystals to become more rounded.

And Rose's article ignores regional variation in air temperature, even within Greenland. "Heat transport into the Arctic bypassed Greenland to its east. Svalbard [an archipelago in the North Norway region] has had a warm summer."

Meltfactor blog: http://www.meltfactor.org/blog/?p=1222

Greenland had a record warm episode in July (not due to the North Atlantic airstream), but then there was fresh snowfall in the south that brightened the surface more than usual; yet in the northwest the albedo was unusually low.

Journalists, whichever side you take (should you be taking sides?): it's just not that simple. And the polar ice cap cover is only one of a wide range of measures being assessed and discussed in the climate change debate.

I don't suppose Rose is likely to listen - he's doing too well out of incompletely-researched contrarianism. Unfortunately, he's writing in the most-read newspaper in the UK.

He's not the only professional side-taker: look at Matt Ridley, the self-styled "rational optimist", whose home farm promotes organic and traditional farming while the lord of the manor makes a reputation by telling the world that there's nothing much to worry about. Seems like Greenland isn't the only place where it blows hot and cold.

"How they are related" footnote:*

"Environment Secretary Owen Paterson’s wife, Rose, is the sister of Viscount Matt Ridley."

Paterson is the Minister currently championing biodiversity offsetting so the developers can have a clear run at the land they want to build on.

Just so you know.

*Even more interestingly, this information appears to have been recently edited out of the Wikipedia entry, but the same fact appears in this Mail article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2346246/Why-did-Tories-change-tune-GM-food-We-expose-secret-summit-slick-lobbyists-bio-tech-giants-seduced-willing-Ministers.html

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Islamic radicalisation - a straw in the wind

Several years ago I spotted a slogan painted on the door of a box of a building on Highgate Road: "KILL DA JEWS". The "da" was clever, designed to appeal to the would-be South Central LA homeboys. It was soon painted over, of course, but.

I used to work with a project not far from there, that got 15-year-olds off the streets who'd been out of school for some time. We gave them basic maths and English, and practical work in the form of carpentry and joinery (they made some great doll's houses). The idea was to settle them and get them ready for sixth form college so they could get some qualifications and vocational training. It worked well, and still does.

One boy was a very genial lad who wasn't that bright but corrected my bad work when I tried to clean the project's fish tank and filter. He was hooked on cannabis, "bud" or "Bu-ddha" as he would put it. He knew he wasn't going to get anywhere till he kicked it, but giving up was hard. He needed a core, something to surrender to, just as with the twelve-step program. In his case, he decided to get religion.

So he began his daily discipline through Islam, breaking off from study or play to pray at the right intervals. To help him with his meditations, he had an unlabeled recording he'd got from somewhere and we found him a portable player. It was devotional Islamic song and the voice was exquisite, a calm, pure tenor. I listened with him and our minds went into a blue space.

Maybe five or ten minutes after the start, another voice joined in, preaching hatred for the Zionists. The speaker, in his twenties by the sound of it, also had a pleasant voice, and timed the phrases to blend with the hypnotic beauty of the chant. On and on he went.

I was horrified. This decent lad, young, not academic, impressionable, in need of guidance and leadership, was being groomed, I thought. I spoke to the other staff, and they pooh-poohed it - he was such a good-hearted kid that we couldn't imagine him doing any harm to anyone; and they were probably right.

But the intention of whoever had burned that CD was clear. And with a cleverer adolescent, ambitious to get some adult status and respect, it would work, given time. There are many young people without jobs, money or much to do, but they can have coffee at each others' houses, swap recordings, surf the Net. It'll start from where they are, in a teen culture of ghetto-speak and weed, then it'll become more serious and focused, bending the twig as it grows. It's not Hitler's health and exercise bands any more, or the uniformed rallies; it's bedroom fantasyland gradually taking on reality.

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Syria update

Looks as though the West, through the Saudis, is trying to buy off the Russians to clear the ground for an attack on Syria:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/10266957/Saudis-offer-Russia-secret-oil-deal-if-it-drops-Syria.html

(htp: Tap blog)

But in that case, why bother?

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404: Democracy not found

In 404 BC Sparta, a militaristic kingdom, defeated Athens, a democracy run by an assembly composed of all its free men. Tyranny 1, Freedom 0.

Syria may not be a democracy in the mould of Athens - Index Mundi classes it as a "republic under an authoritarian regime" - but under its 2012 Constitution it does have (as well as a President) a Prime Minister, a unicameral legislature and multi-party elections.

Now look at the alternative, as illustrated by this Facebook video from SyriaOnline (CAUTION: contains graphic scenes of murder). The putative Al-Nusra Front terrorists in that compilation state cheerfully that they intend to kill the Syrian Alawites (the sect to which the Assad family belongs) and re-establish the Muslim Caliphate - all the way to Spain.

Human rights in Syria have long been a concern. However, consider the challenges of running a country where many people don't "agree to disagree" or consider themselves bound by the will of the majority, but will kill to have their way and glory in the slaughter.

What would you do? It's not like governing Britain or America - not that either of those is slow to use force to maintain internal authority. So, a black-leather-glove democracy versus a violent theocratic revolutionary horde - your choice?

Then there's a fog of conflicting assertions about the use of chemical weapons, the artillery strike on eastern Turkey (from which, allegedly, the Free Syrian Army is waiting to invade) and so on. It seems as though people have become far more skeptical since Iraq - and Libya.

Underneath the fog seem to be economic and geopolitical motives - Qatar wishing to extend the Arab Pipeline northwards through Syrian territory and into Turkey, Assad wanting to refresh the east-to-west Kirkuk-Banias Pipeline, the Saudis and the US keen to complete and make secure the Nabucco pipeline in competition with Russia's Gazprom network in Europe (connected with the alleged 2008 "Pythia" plot against the then Greek Premier Kostas Karamanlis, who was negotiating with the Russians re a branch of the South Stream to cross northern Greece - see the Gazprom site here).

According to a Turkish colleague of mine, Erdogan's out at the next election, having upset so many of the populace - but if Turkey should ever decide to throw in her lot with the Islamists, we might wish Karamanlis had concluded the South Stream deal, after all.

South Stream: http://www.gazprom.com/about/production/projects/pipelines/south-stream/2012/

The old Trans-Arabian Pipeline: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Arabian_Pipeline

The Kirkuk-Banias Pipeline: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirkuk%E2%80%93Baniyas_pipeline

 

Nabucco and others: http://www.economist.com/node/14041672

Would you send your son to risk his life in a fight there - and what for, and on which side?

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Order for the Service of Holy Communication

Collect from the Revised Book of Common Interaction (2013):

ALMIGHTY GOVERNMENT, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid; Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Special Advisers, Public Relations and News Media, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy Name…

Cum privilegio gubernatorum
________________________

http://gizmodo.com/the-nsa-can-crack-almost-any-type-of-encryption-1258954266

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-how-to-remain-secure-surveillance

http://armstrongeconomics.com/2013/09/06/nsa-breaks-encryption-here-we-go-again-there-is-nobody-and-nothing-they-have-not-tapped/

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Global warming continues

A new videopost this week revisits the contention that global warming has stopped (htp: Paddington).

Not so, it seems: there are many different measures being used to assess climate change and one of them is the temperature of the upper levels of the oceans, which is rising. The seas are acting as the reservoir for most of the heat gain so far -

(Image from above video)

- and the heat is expanding their volume (a point I hadn't thought of). So it's not just ice melt that will affect sea level rise.

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Spain: "What is 'the crisis?'" - by Brett Hetherington

Brett Hetherington's latest article in Catalonia Today magazine (reproduced with the kind permission of the author):

(Photo: Javier)

This so-called crisis, which would more accurately be called a“depression” is a thousand varied things that need never have happened.

Despite the occasional sensation that life is just continuing on very much as before, the crisis here is certainly the more obvious things that many of us see when we care to look: more beggars on the streets, long queues in shoe repair shops, the recent appearance of solitary men selling tissues or cigarette lighters on the trains and Metro, a greater number of empty shops for sale or rent (or replaced by cheapo-import Chinese shops) and it is also reading more socio-political graffiti on walls.

 

The crisis is a European-wide failure of institutions like the financial system and the pathetic political response to it, but it is also a very immediate, local phenomenon.

In the small town where I live, three years ago there was both a bank and a restaurant – now there is neither.

As well, there are the abstract statistics that simply cannot put a human face to this tragedy - day after day of grim, sullen economic news.

 

Three months ago, a newspaper headline stated that “60% of Andalusian children live in poverty.”

 

This sounds remote and abstract until we learn that there were children in Catalonia who were still going to school in July just to eat lunch, and they had to do this because it is next to impossible for their parents to provide daily meals at home.

But the crisis is about work too.

 

It is hearing that another man has lost his job, or finding that your wife's job has been cut in half and therefore her income has also been halved.

It is thousands of workers still lucky enough to have a job but not being “lucky” enough to get paid for their labour...for yet another month.

 

And it is the insult of "mini-jobs" - (the underpaid mileurista is seeming like the one who is well-off) or it is listening to people at a café talking about the benefits of learning Chinese or German, ahead of English.

As well, the crisis is the news media being full of corrupt, cowardly politicians talking about everything except what could end the crisis.

 

For thousands of people not in the aptly-termed “political class”, it is a rapid or a gradual descent into poverty – what George Orwell called “the crust-wiping,” - that constant search for ways to save money but still ending up unsatisfied after you eat.

 

On top of all this, the crisis is that all-day sensation of being unpleasantly squeezed by the invisible forces of debt, a permanent unconscious burden that is carried by the unemployed and under-employed when a family has no genuine bread-winner.

But what is it that has saved this country from violence, riots and social disturbance on a grand scale?

The family.

The extended family, acting as helpers, carers and givers of money, love, and as many kinds of assistance that you can think of.

 

Without this blood-linked stability across Mediterranean Europe, things would surely be even worse.

Sometimes, when I have thought about the crisis I have been reminded of a Bob Dylan line about how the sun starts to shine on him.

 

But then (in a single phrase that could speak for millions of Europe's economic victims) he sadly sings “but it's not like the sun that used to be.”

 

[A version of the above text was first published as an opinion piece in Catalonia Today magazine, September 2013.]

 

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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.

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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.

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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.

 

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Britain's food security: the future challenge

Land area needed to feed a family of four. Graphic: Dave Llorens (2011)

According to this Wikipedia article, for each square kilometre of arable land Russia has 117 people to feed, the US has 179, and the UK... 1,077. In a future where energy has become very expensive and other countries feed their own people first, could Britain sustain itself without imports?

The infographic above suggests not. The author calculates that a family of four would need 89,050 square feet of land for food, or slightly over 2 acres. Per 4 people in the UK, we have 39,977 square feet of arable land, i.e. only 45% of the estimated requirement.

We may not always be able to fly in cheap vegetables from Kenya and Zimbabwe, and out-of-season fruit from around the world.

Do we have a plan?

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Salt Power

Where river meets sea we have an opportunity to extract not just tidal energy, but energy derived from the difference between salt water and fresh. Maybe if energy policies were rational we wouldn’t have such opportunities, but we are where we are.

Pressure Retarded Osmosis

With pressure retarded osmosis, or PRO, the idea is to take advantage of the osmotic pressure created when river water and sea water are separated by a semi-permeable membrane.

Under these conditions, water molecules from the river pass through the membrane into the sea water, creating a pressure on the sea water side of the membrane which may be used to drive turbines and generate electricity.

A pilot plant in Norway which has been generating a few kilowatts since 2009. As with so many sustainable energy technologies, the problem is one of energy density. There simply isn’t much energy to be extracted from each square metre of membrane.

Huge areas of membrane, in the order of square kilometres may be required to scale up the technology, but these membranes are also prone to fouling, so the technical issues are formidable.

 

Reverse Electrodialysis

A less developed but simpler and perhaps more interesting way to extract energy from seawater and river water is Reverse Electrodialysis or RED.

In the RED approach, the osmotic energy of mixing fresh and salt water is captured by directing the solution through an alternating series of positively and negatively charged exchange membranes. The resulting chemical potential difference creates a voltage over each membrane and leads to the production of direct electric energy.

As with PRO, there are many technical hurdles and much research to be done, but a Dutch company called REDstack B V began work on a pilot plant in July. Both technologies are clean, highly modular and relatively well understood.

Could the Severn estuary be used to generate both tidal power and power from a technology such as PRO or RED?

We certainly have the ingenuity - pity about the politics.

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