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tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37049576748431910142018-03-06T08:56:21.882+00:00John Medway's energy descentThis blog originated with my involvement with Transition Horsham which aims to stimulate local action to tackle the threats of climate change and resource depletion. It now goes beyond my personal "energy descent" to embrace wider but related economic, political and social issues. I can't claim to be any more than a student of these issues. The blog tracks my progress. More for the fun of it, it also tracks my progress as a (permanently amateur) photographer.John Medwayhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-43910444930312434512017-02-23T20:42:00.001+00:002017-02-23T20:42:23.256+00:00When is a quote not a quote?This week, the Lords have been discussing the Brexit bill. There have been some very fine speeches, including one by Lord (Frank) Judd, a highly respected former Labour MP. At one point, according to Hansard, he said:

" There has been a good deal of talk in this debate about taking the 48% seriously, but there is another statistic that we must never discount. Only 37% of the electorate actually voted for Brexit. That is hardly an indication of the overwhelming popular will; it is an indication that some highly motivated people mobilised their case well and effectively."

This is how this was reported on the Express website (http://www.express.co.uk/news/politics/770078/house-of-lords-brexit-debate-live-article-50-bill-theresa-may):

'Lord Judd, Labour, said: "We are the peers, we should not bow to the demands of the people, only 36 per cent of the people voted for Brexit." '

Note that the Express "quote" is presented as just that - not a paraphrase but a word-for-word quote. Could it be that readers of some popular news sources might be ever so slightly in danger of being misinformed on some matters?John Medwayhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-90077417664757307412017-01-23T18:07:00.000+00:002017-01-23T20:37:05.665+00:00Utopia or realism?I have just read Phillip Inman's article in The Observer (22 January 2017) - Utopian ideas on climate change will get us precisely nowhere. It's dangerous stuff - offering what could be a self-fulfilling prophecy that we will fail to do what is needed to tackle the threat of catastrophic climate change.

I generally agree with the first part of the article, which elaborates on the title. Later he makes some sensible points about, for instance, switching to electric cars. I part company from him when he says:

Aircraft makers should be forced to make their planes more efficient, and airport owners must clean up the pollution they create. But this is an exercise in minimising the impact of flying, given that its expansion is inevitable.
Increasing the efficiency of planes is no substitute for reductions in flying. The laws of physics set a limit to aircraft efficiency and we are getting close to that limit. (This was explained some years ago by the late Sir David MacKay). Flying, like most travel, is an intrinsically energy-intensive activity. Because of its speed, low cost and convenience, it encourages us to travel long distances frequently. It seems inconceivable that aviation can continue for long at anything like its present level if we are serious about lowering the risk of catastrophic climate change.

The world needs to be completely carbon neutral by about 2050 - or sooner if we use up our remaining carbon budget before then. How much flying will be possible in a zero-carbon world? I have only seen one estimate (from the Centre for Alternative Technology) - about a third of what we do now.

Furthermore, expansion of aviation is not inevitable - it is the choice of today's politicians to allow it to happen. Much of our population seems ill-informed about the seriousness of the threat from climate change and sees little moral obligation to make more than token personal gestures to mitigate that threat. The crime of our present generation of politicians is that they go along with this. They follow public opinion where they should be leading it. Responsibility lies on their shoulders. It is their duty to be better informed and more morally aware than the bulk of the population.

If we are not lucky or proactive enough to avoid catastrophic climate change, future generations will regard our present politicians, with some exceptions, as criminally negligent. My feelings are summed up in what Dylan Thomas famously said:-

Do not go gentle into that good night...
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
For me, "the light" is our civilisation and the once stable physical climate that made it possible. John Medwayhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-89864278494260857292016-10-26T20:53:00.000+01:002016-10-26T20:53:34.311+01:00So it's Heathrow
Last week I commented on the then impending decision on a new runway at Heathrow or Gatwick. At the weekend I was pleased to see an opinion piece in The Observer by David Mitchell, where he raised a question:

Climate change is definitely happening. Aviation contributes hugely to it. So global levels of aviation must be significantly reduced. Why is it, then, that everyone with a whisker of a chance of power agrees that London's airport capacity should increase?

George Monbiot also weighed in on this in The Guardian last week. He is dismissive of the idea that any large-scale aviation can be carbon-neutral:-

The airline companies seek to divert us with a series of mumbo-jumbo jets, mythical technologies never destined for life beyond the press release. Solar passenger planes, blended wing bodies, hydrogen jets, algal oils, other biofuels: all are either technically impossible, commercially infeasible, worse than fossil fuels or capable of making scarcely a dent in emissions.

I remain open to the possibility of a synthetic fuel derived largely from biomass using renewable energy but that still doesn't point to aviation continuing on anything like its present scale. I have my queries about some of Monbiot's detailed points but his conclusion looks sound: flying needs to be reduced and airport expansion makes no sense.

Today the the decision in favour of Heathrow was announced. Particularly in view of the Paris Agreement, I was interested to see what the government had to say about climate change in their announcement. It said:

Today's announcement follows an unprecedented UN global agreement achieved earlier this month to combat aviation emissions. Under the deal, airlines will offset their emissions with reductions from other sectors to deliver carbon neutral growth for the aviation sector from 2020. The government believes that a new runway at Heathrow can be delivered within the UK's carbon obligations.

It remains to be seen how the government will try and justify that belief. The Committee on Climate Change gave its response earlier this month to the Paris Agreement. It does not help us very much on this issue but it acknowledges the difficult issue that aviation poses:-

Even with full deployment of known low-carbon measures some UK emissions will remain, especially from aviation, agriculture and parts of industry. Greenhouse gas removal options (e.g. afforestation, carbon storing materials, bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, and direct air capture and storage) will be required alongside widespread decarbonisation in order to reach net zero emissions.

I can't help feeling that there is a lot of wishful thinking in high places that tackling climate change is compatible with business-as-usual. Facing the possibility that our way of doing things might need to change radically seems not yet politically acceptable.

This isn't just my feeling. A year ago, Professor Kevin Anderson, Deputy Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, upbraided his scientific colleagues in a think-piece in which he concluded:

The IPCC's synthesis report and the scientific framing of the mitigation challenge in terms of carbon budget was an important step forward. Despite this, there remains an almost global-scale cognitive dissonance with regards to acknowledging the quantitative implications of the analysis, including by many of those contributing to its development. We simply are not prepared to accept the revolutionary implications of our own findings, and even when we do we are reluctant to voice such thoughts openly.

Policy on airport expansion seems to me to be the clearest sign of this cognitive dissonance.
John Medwayhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-41493745825120698472016-10-19T19:54:00.000+01:002016-10-19T20:09:50.295+01:00Heathrow or Gatwick - do either make sense?
Recent political events have caused some previously disjointed thoughts to coalesce.

Let's start with the impending decision on whether a new runway should be built at Heathrow or Gatwick. This raises an interesting question: how much aviation will be possible in a zero-carbon Britain and a zero-carbon world? The only attempt at an answer that I know of comes from the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), who gave a tentative estimate in 2013 that in zero-carbon Britain, aviation would be limited to about a third of its present level.

Some flying will be possible, if planes can be made to run entirely on synthetic fuels. This looks technically feasible and it seems likely that fuels could be synthesised in a way that does not directly compete with food production, perhaps using biomass and hydrogen produced using solar power. However, if the CAT estimate is borne out, flying will still need to be cut by two thirds. This is partly because the warming effect of emissions from flying is greater than through the release of the same gases at ground level.

The days are long gone when an 80% reduction in carbon emissions, enshrined in the Climate Change Act, was an adequate target for 2050 (see a previous posting). With some increases in efficiency, that 80% target would have allowed aviation to continue at least at its present level until 2050. In the absence of proven technologies to suck greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, the whole world needs not only to be carbon-neutral by about 2050 but also to keep within a strict carbon budget in the meantime. We won't suddenly be cutting aviation by two thirds in 2049. Long before then, we will need a reduction in flying to contribute to the general reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.

How sensible, then, is it to cater for expanding demand? If we are serious about climate change, the level of carbon-intensive activities should be determined not just by demand but also by the need to cut carbon emissions. If the CAT estimate is anywhere near right, investment in new airport capacity looks like stranded assets from the start.

The drive for airport expansion is getting extra impetus from Brexit. Reduced trade with EU countries implies more trade with more distant countries and that means more demand for long-haul flights. It also implies that the goods we import and export will travel longer distances and will hence require more energy to deliver to their markets.

However, other scenarios are possible. Reduction in trade with the EU countries may simply mean less trade overall. This could mean that the British economy becomes more self-contained, diverse and resilient but less efficient, yielding lower but perhaps adequate material living standards. Britain could become a pioneer in post-growth economics - though I doubt if this is what many people had in mind when they voted Leave.
John Medwayhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-84953490718577209982016-08-05T10:11:00.000+01:002016-08-05T10:14:47.310+01:00More on nuclear versus renewablesMy last posting was about the late Professor Sir David MacKay's opinion that the UK could not manage on renewable energy alone and that if we had enough nuclear and carbon capture and storage to get us through the winter (when solar power is very weak) we would have enough for the rest of the year and renewables would be superfluous. After that posting, I looked at the contrary view offered by the Centre for Alternative Technology in their 2013 publication Zero Carbon Britain (ZCB).

ZCB envisages heavy reliance on offshore wind but with 17% of the UK's land area given over to energy production - some of it through on-shore wind but a substantial amount through growing biomass such as miscanthus (elephant grass) and coppiced willow and poplar. Surplus renewable energy from wind etc. in the summer months would be used to produce hydrogen from water by hydrolysis. The hydrogen would be combined, using the Sabatier reaction, with CO2 from burning biomass (eg in conventional power stations or combined heat and power plants) to yield methane, which would be used as fuel in the winter, particularly for gas-fired electricity generation. The gas-fired generators would be switched off for most of the year and used only when there was insufficient renewable energy available, such as on windless days. If the sums add up, and I would guess that they do, this would appear to answer MacKay's point about the difficulty of getting through the winter on renewables.

The land taken up for energy crops would not be available for food production. Most agricultural land in the UK is currently used for grazing livestock and half of the the arable land is used for growing animal feed. At present we produce about 60% of our own food. To allow us to be self-sufficient in food, with land available for energy crops, ZCB assumes that we adopt a predominantly (but not totally) vegan diet. Furthermore, our overall energy use is assumed to decline by 60% through improved energy efficiency and behaviour change. It envisages, for instance, that flying would have to reduce to a third of its present level.

ZCB does not pretend to take into account financial or political constraints. Perhaps the economic cost is no greater than for a nuclear-based strategy - that's something I need to do more work on. However the political difficulties look more formidable, particularly given the massive assumed reduction in meat and dairy consumption. MacKay, on the other hand, takes a view on what he regards as politically feasible and this leads him to the conclusion that we can't do without nuclear energy. To over-simplify things, perhaps if want to carry on eating meat we need to go nuclear so we don't have to sacrifice precious grazing land for energy crops. It's actually more complicated than that because ZCB also assumes that we become largely self-sufficient in food.

Given MacKay's premises on political feasibility, I can't fault his conclusions. I hope his premises are wrong but I fear they may be right. I don't object in principle to nuclear energy but in my heart I much prefer the idea of renewables. Unfortunately, my head isn't yet in full agreement with my heart.John Medwayhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-73537277051912633502016-08-01T09:34:00.000+01:002016-08-01T09:34:17.440+01:00Nuclear versus renewables

The other day I was doing some crude calculations on the feasibility of renewable energy in Britain. This came after I had detected some euphoria about the potential for solar power now that costs of solar panels have fallen and large-scale battery storage is becoming possible. I tentatively concluded that we could get all the energy we currently use if we were prepared to cover about 11% of the land area of the UK with solar farms. This was on the basis that, on average, a solar farm in the UK can deliver about 10 watts per square metre of land occupied by the farm. An on-shore wind farm, by contrast, can only deliver about 2 watts per square metre, though the land between the turbines can be used for other things. I then put together a very crude energy plan for the UK, using a combination of solar, off-shore wind, on-shore wind, tidal and wave power. It assumed that 30% of our current energy use would be from solar farms, occupying about 3% of our land, and that our energy demand would be reduced, through efficiency measures and demand management, by 37%. It looked just about feasible, technically if not politically.

Then I came across this video in which the late and highly-respected Professor Sir David MacKay is interviewed by Mark Lynas eleven days before his untimely death in April. You can see what I thought was a pretty fair summary of the key points here. MacKay's book, Sustainable energy without the hot air, was my main source of information on the feasibility of renewable energy.

This reminded me of a devastating fact - that at midwinter in the UK, solar panels yield only about a ninth of the power they yield in midsummer, or about a quarter of their average yield. We would be getting the least energy from our largest single source at the time when our need for energy was greatest. To meet our winter energy needs with 30% solar, according to my very crude and questionable calculations, we would need to cover at least 12% of our land area - the same proportion as our urban and developed land - with solar farms. Tidal generators would be the only major source of reliable renewable energy in winter.

MacKay's conclusion was that nuclear power and fossil-fuelled power stations with carbon capture and storage were the only feasible main options for getting us through the winter. Also, if they gave us enough power to get us through the winter, they would be more than enough to get us through the rest of the year so that energy from renewable sources would be superfluous.

He stressed that this conclusion only applied to the UK. Most of the world's population lives at latitudes where sunlight is much stronger, where there is less difference in its intensity between summer and winter and where demand for energy, such as for air conditioning and refrigeration, is high when the sun is at its strongest. So over much of the world, solar power, combined with battery technology, really does look like a potential main source of energy - hence the euphoria over its falling cost.

However, the implications for the UK are depressing and disturbing. Our present nuclear strategy looks extremely dodgy, with heavy reliance on Chinese finance and on an unproven technology. The high strike price for electricity generated from the proposed new Hinkley Point reactor doesn't worry me unduly. At the moment, energy seems far too cheap when we take into account the risks from global warming. Fuel poverty should be addressed by relieving poverty generally and by making homes energy efficient. (The "rebound effect", whereby increased energy efficiency stimulates additional demand, would be negated by higher energy prices.)

Nor am I worried about the disposal of the resulting nuclear waste. Modern nuclear reactors are expected to generate about 10% of the waste from the earlier reactors so new nuclear power stations will add almost insignificantly to the waste problem we already have. My main worry is that we won't be able to build nuclear power stations, or develop and deploy carbon capture and storage, fast enough both to meet our energy needs and our commitments on emissions reductions. We risk either an energy gap or a major contribution to a future climate catastrophe.

Gas is generally seen as the answer to our woes as, at the point of burning, it generates about half the amount of CO2 per unit of energy compared with coal. However, it doesn't seem clear that gas is substantially cleaner than coal once we take into account the leaking of methane into the atmosphere between the extraction of gas from the ground and the point of burning.

Does this mean there is no place for renewables in the UK? In the interview, MacKay made clear one of his premises - that people and politicians in the UK want cheap energy. In my view, the need to decarbonise should take priority over the cheapness of energy. During the 2020s we will still be relying heavily on gas, both for domestic heating and for electricity generation. Gas-fired generators can be switched on and off. There is therefore a role for renewables in enabling gas-fired generators to be left switched off whenever there is adequate renewable energy available. This would probably be uneconomic in conventional terms as  it would be reducing the return on investment in the gas-fired generators. However, it probably looked uneconomic to resist Hitler in 1940. Some threats force us (or should force us) to look at economic considerations in a different light.

If carbon emissions were capped at a sufficiently low level to render catastrophic climate change extremely unlikely, and energy priced accordingly, then heavy investment in renewables might make sense to minimise our use of gas and help keep us warm until nuclear and / or other technologies are able to meet our energy needs.

I need to do more work on this.John Medwayhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-85290112616659470512016-04-18T20:53:00.002+01:002016-04-18T20:56:19.003+01:00David MacKayI was very sorry to read today about the death of Sir David MacKay, FRS.

In what I write on my blog etc. I often refer firstly to the urgency and importance of tackling the threat of climate change and secondly on the difficulty of doing so. My thinking on the second point is derived almost entirely from David MacKay's book, Sustainable energy - without the hot air, which I first read seven years ago and frequently refer to.

You can read his obituary, by Mark Lynas in the Guardian. John Medwayhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-66160313357186597452016-04-11T23:29:00.000+01:002016-04-11T23:29:02.698+01:00The future of workThis evening I went to an event at the New Economics Foundation featuring a discussion between Ed Miliband (former leader of the Labour Party) and Nick Srnicek, co-author with Alex Williams of Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a world without work, which I have read. I found the book and the discussion stimulating in a number of ways.

My policy interests centre on climate change and its economic implications and I am increasingly finding that the biggest challenge in dealing with it is political. Climate change is an intrinsically difficult political problem because the people who will suffer the worst consequences will be future generations and few people seem to think they have a personal interest or a moral imperative to help tackle it. Furthermore there are some rich and powerful people who have - and pursue vigorously - a vested interest in our not tackling it. This has parallels in other policy areas, including the one discussed in the book.

The central argument of the book concerns the spread of automation and its implications. The authors say that the left should embrace automation and aim to use it to allow people to work less or not at all, with a universal basic income making this possible.

This resonates with what I have thought for a long time about the future of work. If and when we get serious about tackling global warming, low-carbon technologies may not be developed and deployed fast enough to allow anything like our present pattern of production and consumption to continue; we may need to consume a lot less and produce a lot less, so reducing the demand for labour. This could be a boon; a greater quality of life arising from shorter working hours could more than compensate for the lower material living standards resulting from reduced production.

However, another future is possible. The universal basic income might not be adopted or it might be set at too low a level. In that case the reduced demand for labour might simply work through into lower wages but with people still working long hours, perhaps doing work which at present would be deemed uneconomic. Such a scenario might be what some of the rich and powerful would like to see. See, for instance, this report of what Jeremy Hunt said at the last Conservative Party conference.

Of course, work has benefits other than the income it generates. Purposeful work can be intrinsically satisfying. But, as someone said in this evening's discussion: "There is inequality between those who enjoy their work and those who don't." If universal basic income shifts the balance of power from employers towards workers, it gives more scope for people to find enjoyable work or to demand shorter hours or higher pay for work that is not enjoyable.

The early chapters of the book highlight the limitation of what the authors call "folk-politics". By this they mean actions, such as demonstrations, occupations etc. that occur in a specific place and which generally do not scale up to anything approaching effective political action. This also chimed with me. I'm all for action at a local level but this seems to be no substitute for the cultivation of a national and international consensus in favour of social and economic developments to promote general well-being for present and future generations. The book is an important contribution towards that consensus.

Nick Srnicek is by background a Marxist philosopher. I have revealed in an earlier post my lack of enthusiasm for Marxism and its preoccupation with moving beyond capitalism to, for want of a better term, non-capitalism, or post-capitalism as some prefer to call it. However, I found in reading the book that I could see beyond the Marxist assumptions and language to some ideas that warrant very serious examination.John Medwayhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-57947306430075080452016-03-24T12:05:00.000+00:002016-03-24T12:05:39.330+00:00The budget gorillaMatthew Green had rather a good piece in his blog last week, following the Budget. As usual, I found it interesting and generally in line with my own views but with some exceptions.

His piece is about "the gorilla in the room". In my experience it's usually an elephant, but I won't quarrel on a matter of fauna-in-camera. He's talking about the big difference between public sector financial commitments over the coming years and the plans to finance them. I agree with his main thesis that there is a serious problem.

I was quite surprised that he takes the standard Coalition line where he says "That this has still meant dramatic cuts to public spending shows just how out of control the government finances had become under the previous government, as it pursued the illusory goal of Scandinavian public spending backed by US taxes."

My own take on this is that the deficits run up by Labour in the mid-noughties were not a major cause of our post-2008 problems. The real problem was that we had come to rely on the banks too much as a cash cow for the Exchequer. When the profitability of the banks collapsed in 2008, tax revenue collapsed with it and that left us with an ongoing hole in our finances. I think the more serious failing of the Blair-Brown years was in allowing the banking system to develop the way it did. However, I don't remember many commentators talking about this at the time, whereas the failure of Gordon Brown to comply with his own "golden rule" on balancing the books over the business cycle was widely noted.

The issue of banking failure is dear to my heart at the moment because at the next meeting of the Kennington Sustainability Study Group (on Wednesday, April 6th, the start of the UK fiscal year, if anybody's interested) we will be discussing "Money". Now the first thing to bear in mind is that the economy of a nation with its own currency is not like a household. The government can create out of nothing whatever money it needs to finance its spending or to keep the economy running. The notion that governments must borrow the difference between what they spend and what they raise in taxes etc is a piece of fiction that politicians use to justify either raising taxes or cutting spending. They get away with it partly because most people don't understand what money is and partly because the fiction is not all that far from the truth. Real resources commandeered through government spending - labour, capital, raw materials, foreign currency etc. - are then unavailable for use by businesses and households. Also, the stability of the currency matters a great deal and, if deflation, excessive inflation or a roller-coaster exchange rate are to be avoided, the supply of money needs to be matched to the potential of the real economy.

This is particularly important in an economy as open as the UK's, which reminds me of what I think of a second large mammal in the room - our trade deficit. This issue raises interesting questions for me. Which causes the other: the surplus on the capital account and hence an over-valued pound, as more of our industry, infrastructure, national debt, land and property gets sold to foreigners; or a deep-seated propensity to over-consume imports and/or under-produce exports? Could an underlying problem be inadequate private saving and excessive borrowing for consumer spending during boom times? I suspect there is a complex pattern of cause and effect working both ways between the capital and current accounts and others no doubt have a much better handle on this than I do.

Matthew Green alludes to the current account deficit but only in the context of the constraint he thinks this would impose on "people's QE". As it happens, I think "people's QE" or "sovereign money creation" is rather a good idea, but only as part of a balanced strategy that reduces money creation by private banks from a typical 97% of all money in circulation. In other words, I tend to favour the idea that the public sector should create more money and private sector less. This would have at least three major advantages.

Firstly it should make for greater stability in the banking sector and make us less vulnerable to the sort of things that happened in 2007-8.

Secondly, money creation is a very profitable activity. With increased sovereign money creation, some of the profits that currently accrue to banks would go to the government instead, so helping to reduce the deficit.

Thirdly, if there were another banking crisis (as some commentators think there almost certainly will be) the effects would be more limited.

Against all this, of course, there would be no return of the banks as a cash cow for the Exchequer. But I have to confess that I have a lot more reading to do around the issues of money and banking.

While I have my differences with bits of Matthew Green's post, I think his overall message is right. The public sector deficit is a serious problem and there is no simple, painless answer to it. I think that sovereign money creation might play a substantial part in the solution and might facilitate a much-needed increase in public-sector investment in infrastructure, particularly in energy conservation and clean energy. But this will not obviate a need for reduced consumption by some so that the government's commitments to others can be honoured.John Medwayhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-9614258904699004462016-02-16T19:38:00.000+00:002016-02-16T19:38:34.757+00:00A tantalising glimpse....A report this week in The Guardian (Europe's climate change goals 'need profound lifestyle changes') gives a tantalising glimpse of what might be in store in Europe on action against climate change following the Paris Agreement. It's tantalising because the report is about a leaked document from European commission. Because it is not yet published, what we know about it is confined to what is in the Guardian article and that is very scant.

However, I am encouraged for two reasons. Firstly, I am struggling to work out just how far-reaching will be the lifestyle changes needed to reduce the threat from climate change to acceptable proportions and the report, when it is finally published, should help me on my way. Secondly, this seems to be a rare example of an official document recognising that far-reaching changes will be necessary. Not long ago, the message from on-high seemed to be that climate change was a serious problem but all would be well as long as we didn't leave our televisions on stand-by.

My joy is damped by two thoughts. One is about possible Brexit, which, if it happens, could release our Government from any climate-related obligations coming from the EU. The second is about the ability of the EU to agree on necessary action, particularly following the recent change in government in Poland. The Guardian this week has a long article about the party now in charge in Poland and it's not comforting reading. I'm no expert on EU procedures but I have a feeling that the new Polish government will strain every sinew to try and stop any effective action by the EU against climate change.John Medwayhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-4662063929484722992016-02-01T20:00:00.000+00:002016-02-01T20:01:30.748+00:00The Paris Agreement and the Committee on Climate ChangeWhen I wrote my blog post a couple of weeks ago on the implications of the Paris Agreement, I was looking forward to seeing how the Committee on Climate Change would respond. Last week it gave its first response, as you can see from this report from The Guardian.

The main thrust of the response was to reaffirm its recommended fifth carbon budget for the UK covering the period 2028-32. This has disappointed some climate activists and made me curious to see what was the committee's logic. Given the major gaps in my knowledge, I found the committee's letter to Amber Rudd interesting and informative, particularly the Annex.

The letter comes over as only a preliminary response to the Paris Agreement. In particular, we should note the final paragraph of the Annex, which says:-

A key element of the Paris Agreement that goes beyond our assumptions is the aim to hold the increase in global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels, and pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5°C. This draws into question whether three distinct, but inter-related, aspects of the climate regime are still sufficiently ambitious: the fifth carbon budget advice, the 2050 target and the most appropriate target for the UK after 2050. The work we commit to in this letter will consider the latter two issues in more detail. We have concluded that the fifth carbon budget remains appropriate based on current evidence.
The last sentence may look disappointing but I think the implication is that the committee will be reviewing the adequacy of the 2050 target and looking at a target for post 2050. That work may or may not produce evidence that the the fifth carbon budget needs to be reduced. The letter itself is more explicit. It says:

Our judgement is that our existing recommendation is sufficient at this time, although a tighter budget may be needed in the future.
In other words, as might be expected after such a short time, the Committee has not yet investigated the implications of the Paris Agreement and we have yet to see the full response.

My guess remains that the 2050 target (of an 80% reduction in emissions from the 1990 rate) will be shown to be inadequate. Apart from anything else, any target for the rate of emissions in a particular year is in itself inadequate. What really matters is the accumulation of emissions in the meantime and the resulting volume of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere - hence the need for five-year carbon budgets.

However the target has a certain significance in that "It is based on an equal share of emissions per person worldwide in 2050". That looks superficially equitable but takes no account of historic responsibility of developed countries such as the UK for the current level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. I think we can say that the current 2050 target represented the very minimum we could have expected to get away with before the Paris Agreement.

We look forward to the full response to the Paris Agreement by the Committee on Climate Change.John Medwayhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-37567920343805901952016-01-19T22:46:00.000+00:002016-01-19T22:57:53.678+00:00Paul Mason's end of capitalismI have recently had my attention drawn again to a seminal Guardian article by Paul Mason, which first appeared six months ago.

I'm almost a fan of Mason. He writes some thought-provoking stuff, much of which I'm inclined to agree with. I think of him as a natural political ally but not quite a kindred spirit. This is because I don't share his preoccupation with the "end of capitalism".

A number of agents and factors motivate the provision of goods and services - markets, public administrations, community spirit, the intrinsic satisfaction of productive work, sheer creativity and perhaps much else. What Mason would describe as the decline of capitalism, I would describe as a decline in the importance of markets as motivators of production.

For a variety of reasons, markets are in decline in some areas. As Mason points out, they are being undermined in the information industries and beyond as digital technology has made it cheap and easy to make and store perfect reproductions of text, software, data, pictures, sound and video. In other areas, increased government intervention is likely in response to environmental threats such as from climate change.

Further government interventions may become unavoidable in the area of banking and other financial services - if only to allow markets to function better. Growing perceptions of social injustice may generate political will to address, through government action, such issues as gross income and wealth inequality.

Let us assume that, over the world economy as a whole, these actual and potential blows to the significance of markets are unmatched by the enhancement of markets in other areas - such as a de-bureaucratisation of economic life in India. Does there come a point where we can say that the world economy, or some major part of it, is no longer "capitalist"?

Perhaps, but "frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn". I am not a Marxist but I am not a fervent economic liberal either. I see threats to individual welfare and liberty coming as much from plutocracy as from an overweening state. I think the state should be as big as it needs to be to do what we want it do and no bigger. Reversing what I see as a drift towards plutocracy is one of the things I want it to do.

If we reach a happy state where the major threats are averted, where acute suffering is much reduced and where most people have before them growing opportunities to flourish, then I won't care if we call our economic regime capitalism, post-capitalism or something else.John Medwayhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-30959818578502345002016-01-13T21:08:00.001+00:002016-01-13T21:08:34.056+00:00Airport expansion and the Paris AgreementA couple of weeks ago I commented to a fellow blogger on a posting about airport expansion at Heathrow or Gatwick and said:-

COP21 brought a touch of reality to thinking in high places on climate change. One implication is that the UK's commitment to 80% cuts [in greenhouse gas emissions] by 2050 can no longer be considered adequate. By 2050 we will need to be completely carbon neutral, as will the whole world shortly after. This means that by then any aviation will either need to be completely carbon neutral (running exclusively on biofuels or something not yet invented) or offset by carbon-negative activity.

The date by which we become carbon neutral is less important than what we emit in the meantime. We need to start making big cuts in emissions now and I don't think an optimal mix of cuts could exclude aviation.

Hence the big issue is not where we site a new runway but how quickly we can reduce aviation, so turning any new investment in airport capacity into stranded assets....

Sorry – I've made a lot of sweeping statements here. I'll try and justify my position in a resuscitation of my own blog.

Well, this is the resuscitation and I hope my blog survives for a reasonable time before it falls into its next coma.

For me, the key feature of the Paris Agreement was the commitment "to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels". These are weasely words but at least they signal a recognition that to aim for a mere likelihood of keeping warming under 2°C was not enough - it involved an unacceptable risk of runaway global warming with catastrophic consequences for human civilisation.

Since I wrote the comment I have put together my justification based on the Paris Agreement and the latest IPCC assessment report (AR5). It's pretty wonkish so I've relegated it to a separate page. it concludes:

If the government decides to allow expansion at either Heathrow or Gatwick, this will be a clear signal that it has no intention of honouring perhaps the most critical commitment in the Paris Agreement.

My justification strays a little from my original comment as I based it on a scenario showing the phase-out of emissions extending to 2100. However this necessitates global emissions reductions of 95% by 2050 so I think my comment remains broadly valid.

I have a lot of faith in my own fallibility so I would welcome scrutiny of the page and comment by a fellow wonk.

You may well ask why did I bother. After all, no-one ought to take any notice of a quasi-scientific paper by anyone as unqualified as me. Well, I regard myself as a student of the issues and, to get to grips with them, I sometimes feel a need to get my hands dirty and work out my own conclusions from comparatively raw data (raw when compared with, say, the content of a newspaper report). What I have concluded seems roughly in line with what mainstream scientists (but not politicians) are saying.

John Medwayhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-45947411978181544032014-02-02T17:53:00.000+00:002014-02-02T17:53:07.480+00:00Climate change as the paramount issueI may have mentioned before that I participate in a local study group on sustainability which has now been running for slightly less than a year. We discuss many aspects of sustainability but so far we have tended to focus on social and economic issues. Although the issue of climate change has always been there in our minds, we have tended not to focus on it. This, I think, is because none of our early participants has a significant scientific education and so other aspects of sustainability have seemed more accessible.

I think we have to tackle the subject nevertheless. This is because I think the threat from climate change requires us to overturn a lot of generally-accepted thinking about the economy and this has profound political and social implications. Furthermore, other perceived threats to our civilisation - such as food shortages resulting from over-population - would look manageable were they not amplified either by the effects of climate change or by action needed to tackle it. Before I elaborate, I should clarify some of my premises:-

We are currently heading for four, five or even six degrees celsius of global warming by 2100 - ie within the lifetime of many people born recently. Timely action worldwide (of which there is little sign at present) might enable us to limit the rise to two or three degrees.

Four or more degrees of warming probably means that much of the world will no longer be habitable or fertile and therefore it implies a major and abrupt reduction of the world population - hence a generation of people for many or most of whom life would be rendered nasty, brutish and short by starvation, war and disorder.

Even two degrees of warming by 2100 may not bring us to an equilibrium temperature. It may go on rising for several more centuries as a result of positive feedbacks, such as more water vapour held in a warmer atmosphere, forest die-back, methane from melting permafrost and sea-bed clathrates. These would be countered by a negative feedback - increased outward radiation resulting from a higher surface temperature - but the final equilibrium temperature may be higher than would allow much terrestrial life to carry on outside the polar regions.

We have left it too late to take effective action against global warming that does not involve some radical changes to our way of life.

These premises are rather vague and I haven't attempted to assign probabilities to them. It may be that, for reasons presently unknown or not accepted among mainstream climate scientists, we will get away with a benign equilibrium temperature - even if we burn our way through all the remaining accessible fossil fuels. However my limited, lay person's knowledge of the climate science suggests that catastrophe is at least as probable as a benign outcome unless very much more determined action is taken to curb greenhouse gas emissions. If our grandchildren and great-grandchildren live in a benign climate it may be more through good luck than through precautionary action on our part.

Not everyone will agree with my premises. I am open to persuasion that a climate catastrophe is highly improbable - but I need evidence. In the meantime, I see a moral imperative to act decisively to curb our greenhouse gas emissions.

Here are some examples of what I think are the implications:-

Economic policy currently tends to aim at economic growth. Climate change threatens to bring about future economic collapse (along with population collapse and civilisation collapse). Tackling climate change may not be consistent with continued economic growth - we might need a long "managed recession" in order to tackle it effectively.

The threat of economic collapse resulting from climate change means that economic efficiency as defined, say, in terms of value added per unit of labour, is no longer a paramount consideration. Social and economic resilience become more important.

Public policy will need to have sustainability as an overriding aim. This will mean more government intervention in the economy, which may look more like a war economy (which has an overriding aim of winning the war) than what we think of as a peacetime economy. So, for instance, as climate change threatens devastation of food production in many parts of the world, governments will need to ensure that their countries are highly self-sufficient in food, even when it would be more economically efficient to rely heavily on food imports.

A steady-state or receding economy will put great strains on political and financial systems which will no longer be able to meet pension and other commitments from the proceeds of economic growth. However, this may be less of a problem if the threats from global warming are well understood by people generally.

Free markets and globalisation may promote economic efficiency but not necessarily economic resilience. Public interventions will be necessary to promote resilience.

If climate change were not such a major threat, problems such as resource depletion might be tractable through the normal workings of the market. As key minerals became more scarce, the price of them would rise and this would result in more sparing use and progress in finding substitutes. This would apply to fossil fuels; as coal, oil and natural gas became more expensive, the market would bring about higher investment in renewable energy and energy conservation. Unfortunately, the threat of climate change means that we will need to reduce our burning of fossil fuels long before depletion and the market force us to do so. In this area, market forces would work against a desire to tackle the threat of climate change. Hence a need for robust intervention by public authorities.

The challenge of feeding nine billion people may still be tractable in 2050 when the devastating effects of climate change may still lie in the future. By 2100, on the other hand, we may be living in a world that can only support, say, five billion.

So there we have a few reasons why I think climate change is the paramount issue when I consider sustainability or of the future generally. John Medwayhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-47576053426182517292014-01-12T23:02:00.000+00:002014-01-12T23:07:22.257+00:00Nasty, brutish and short?A pregnant relation recently asked me: what does global warming really mean? I replied something along these lines: it means that if your child has a child, then global warming may render that child's life nasty, brutish and short. I wondered afterwards whether I could really justify what I had said. Everything I have read recently suggests that I was right but I want to be prepared to set out in detail why.

In my last blog post, about Tim Jackson's Prosperity without growth?, I hinted that I would be trying to update some of Jackson's figures. In fact, I have a more general project to get a better handle on the figures relevant to global warming and related issues. This familiarisation is intended as a prelude to a wider project to do more campaigning on the issue of climate change.

For some years I have been alarmed at the disconnect between what the science tells us about global warming and what politicians and the public seem prepared to contemplate by way of action. There is, for instance, much talk among politicians about returning to economic growth and hardly any discussion about whether growth is compatible with serious action to mitigate the threat from global warming.
Apart from Prosperity without growth?, two other bits of reading have helped focus my mind. One was an article by Naomi Klein in which she discussed some work by Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows at the Tyndall Centre. To quote from the article:-

To have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the 2° target (which, they and many others warn, already involves facing an array of hugely damaging climate impacts), the industrialised countries need to start cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions by something like 10 per cent a year – and they need to start right now. But Anderson and Bows go further, pointing out that this target cannot be met with the array of modest carbon pricing or green-tech solutions usually advocated by big green groups. These measures will certainly help, to be sure, but they are simply not enough: a 10 per cent drop in emissions, year after year, is virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with coal. In fact, cuts above 1 per cent per year "have historically been associated only with economic recession or upheaval", as the economist Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British government.
As part of my project to get a better handle on the figures, I was keen to see if my own back-of-envelope calculations would produce results similar to the 10% annual cuts in emissions referred to in the article. That is how I have spent the last couple of evenings and my figures come out in the same ballpark. I won't describe my workings here except to say that, using what I thought were reasonable assumptions about growth of emissions in the developing world, I found the figure of annual 10% emission cuts to be roughly consistent with the IPCC's carbon budget, as set out in the first instalment of the Fifth Assessment Report, published last September.

The other bit of reading was from the RSA, a recent report by Jonathan Rowson entitled A new agenda on climate change. This is the most thought-provoking piece I have ever read about the politics and economics of climate change. Rowson sees as the main obstacle to progress, not the outright deniers and well-funded misinformers, but a culture of silence and "stealth denial" affecting much of the population, our political life and media:-

This report makes a case for how Britain can take a leading role in addressing the global climate problem, based on a new agenda that faces up to pervasive 'stealth denial' and the need to focus on keeping fossil fuels in the ground. Our data indicates that about two thirds of the population intellectually accept the reality of anthropogenic climate change, but 'deny' some or all of the commensurate feelings, responsibility and agency that are necessary to deal with it. It is argued that this stealth denial may be what perpetuates the doublethink of trying to minimise carbon emissions while maximising fossil fuel production, and also what makes us expect far too much of energy efficiency gains in the face of a range of rebound effects that lead the energy to be used elsewhere.
For those of us concerned about climate change there is an important message: that we need to challenge our political class and our opinion formers to provide the leadership needed to tackle the threat from global warming. That message may help me direct my efforts over the coming year.John Medwayhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-46944242101104415122014-01-01T17:55:00.002+00:002014-01-01T22:05:15.478+00:00Prosperity without growth?I have just re-read Prosperity without growth?, by Tim Jackson, published in 2009 by the Sustainable Development Commission, which the government abolished in 2011. I skimmed through it when it first came out but, not then having the time to study it in detail, I was left wondering whether action to tackle climate change really does mean doing without economic growth. Although in the long run (perhaps when we're all dead) growth can't continue on a finite planet, it's possible to argue in principle that growth can continue for some years or even decades while we transition towards a zero-carbon economy.

In particular, it seems to me that we could have moved more quickly out of the recent recession if we had had a crash programme of investment in renewable energy and in energy conservation. In this way, action on climate change would actually have promoted growth.

More generally, it seems to me that carbon emissions are the product of several factors which we can express as an equation:-

emissions = population growth x growth in GDP per head x energy intensity of GDP x carbon intensity of energy used

This means, theoretically, that population growth and growth in GDP per head can be more than offset by a reduction in the energy intensity of GDP and/or the carbon intensity of energy used. This offsetting can be achieved partly by technical change and partly by changes in the make-up of aggregate demand. Technical change might involve switching to renewable energy (reducing carbon intensity) or improved insulation of buildings (reducing energy intensity of GDP). Changes in the make-up of aggregate demand might include more spending on education and less spending on long-haul holidays. An ongoing higher rate of investment in conservation and renewable energy would itself constitute a shift in the make-up of aggregate demand away from consumer spending, other government spending or other investment - at least once the economy no longer needed a Keynesian stimulus.

Economic growth driven by investment doesn't imply an increase in living standards because investment would probably need to be at the expense of household consumption. It would nevertheless serve to keep unemployment low and help maintain reasonably good living standards for the worst-off.

So there we have an argument that economic growth could be consistent with reducing our carbon emissions. Does Jackson buy that argument?

No. He might agree with the logic but he would say that it falls down when we apply some arithmetic and evidence from the last couple of decades. Jackson would say that my argument above is an exposition of what he calls "the myth of decoupling". He argues that, while some "relative decoupling" of emissions from growth has taken place, in that emissions have risen more slowly than economic activity (so that the carbon intensity of GDP has fallen), this has not given rise to "absolute decoupling" - in other words, total worldwide emissions have not actually fallen while economic activity has risen. He sees no realistic prospect of this changing. Here are the key paragraphs of his argument:-

Carbon intensities have declined on average by 0.7% per year since 1990. That's good; but not good enough. Population has increased at a rate of 1.3% and average per capita income has increased by 1.4% each year (in real terms) over the same period. Efficiency hasn't even compensated for the growth in population, let alone the growth in incomes. Instead, carbon emissions have grown on average by 1.3 + 1.4 – 0.7 = 2% per year, leading over 17 years to an almost 40% increase in emissions ... The same rule of thumb allows us a quick check on the feasibility of decoupling carbon emissions from growth in the future. The IPCC's Fourth Assessment report suggests that achieving a 450 ppm stabilisation target means getting global carbon dioxide emissions down to below 4 billion tonnes per annum by 2050 or soon after. This would be equivalent to reducing annual emissions at an average rate of 4.9% per year between now and 2050.

But income and global population are going in the opposite direction. According to the UN's mid-range estimate, the world's population is expected to reach nine billion people by 2050 – an average growth of 0.7% each year. Under business as usual conditions, the decline in carbon intensity just about balances the growth in population and carbon emissions will end up growing at about the same rate as the average income – 1.4% a year. It might not sound much, but by 2050, under these assumptions, carbon emissions are 80% higher than they are today. Not quite what the IPCC had in mind.

To achieve an average year-on-year reduction in emissions of 4.9% with 0.7% population growth and 1.4% income growth [carbon intensity of GDP] has to improve by approximately 4.9 + 0.7 + 1.4 = 7% each year – almost ten times faster than it is doing right now. By 2050 the average carbon content of economic output would need to be less than 40 gCO2/$, a 21-fold improvement on the current global average ... . (pp 53-54)
To increase the rate of reduction in carbon intensity tenfold looks virtually impossible. Even if we assume no economic growth (not even economic growth resulting from population growth) we still need to reduce energy intensity by 4.9% a year - seven times the current rate. So on the basis of these figures, the idea that we can have economic growth and meet our long-term emission targets looks laughable. This is before we take into account the need for growth in the developing world to remove people from abject poverty and chronic undernourishment. Nevertheless, with determination and ingenuity, who knows what is possible?

Prosperity without growth? came out in March 2009, nearly five years ago. Since then, the science has moved on and worldwide emissions have continued to rise. It will be interesting to see what happens if we try and update Jackson's figures to take into account what we now know - but that will have to wait for another blog post.

Lastly, there are, of course, huge questions about how we could cope with zero growth. Those are the main questions that Jackson addresses in this publication. As with the science, thinking on the big practical and political questions has moved on since 2009 and provides a cornucopia of material to be discussed in future blog posts. I'm hoping in 2014 to have more success than in 2013 in keeping up a steady flow of study and comment via (among other things) this blog.

Happy New Year!
John Medwayhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-75212075480177324182013-10-01T21:20:00.001+01:002013-10-01T21:50:40.736+01:00The story of solutionsThe story of solutions is another fun, animated video from Annie Leonard and the Story of Stuff Project. Brief, entertaining and with a powerful message - well worth watching.

By the way, I was heartened to find Martin Wolf in the FT saying things similar to what I was saying in my last post. John Medwayhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-19777146315205940632013-09-24T22:07:00.000+01:002013-10-01T21:57:18.478+01:00Denialism isn't confined to global warmingI am an avid reader of Paul Krugman's blog. At a pinch I can call myself an economist (because I have a degree in economics) and that blog is one way I can keep in touch with my profession. (To be honest nobody has ever paid me for being an economist, so my claim to be part of the profession is a little thin.)

Krugman is an out-and-out Keynesian and has consistently raged against the imposition of austerity over these past few years of depression. But he doesn't just rage - he argues cogently and produces evidence to back up what he is saying.

To get a balanced view, I have from time to time hunted for a good exposition of the opposing view - that austerity was a necessary response to high levels of government debt and that it would create the confidence to stimulate the private sector to make up for the contraction of the public sector. I have never found such an exposition. All I have ever found is bluster or what looks like a fundamental misunderstanding of the Keynesian position. Sometimes I am tempted to conclude that, because the austerians produce such bad arguments, they can't have any good ones.

I am left with the impression that no competent and intellectually honest economist would now attempt to defend the austerity that has been imposed on Britain and Europe over the past three and a half years. The British government, rather than crowing about early signs of economic recovery, should be apologising for the three years of economic stagnation that its policies have produced.

Today, my failure to find a convincing economic justification for austerity is echoed by Krugman himself. I'm particularly struck with his final paragraphs:-

Yes, you can find economists at right-wing think tanks and some international organizations making the austerian case, but again, I'm talking about economists with big independent reputations, justified or not. And I can't think of any. That wing of austerianism has simply dissolved.

And as far as we can tell, it makes no difference. Have Paul Ryan, George Osborne, Olli Rehn, Wolfgang Schäuble changed their tune even a bit? No, they're busy claiming one quarter of positive growth as vindication.

For those who like to think that serious economic debates matter, it has been a humbling experience.
What has this got to do with my main pre-occupation - global warming? Quite a lot. The insights of Keynes and his followers make logical sense and appear to be supported by evidence. Yet, because the implications do not always fit well with free-market ideology or right-wing thinking in general, there seems to be a loud denial, unsupported by sound reason or evidence, of the validity and relevance of those insights.

This seems a remarkably precise parallel with the denial of the findings of mainstream science on global warming.John Medwayhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-26532919715748524052013-09-18T19:21:00.000+01:002013-09-18T19:21:22.404+01:00Hansen and the ApocalypseI'm indebted to Joe Romm for drawing my attention to the latest paper from James Hansen and some of his colleagues. It's all about what happens if we carry on burning fossil fuels until they're exhausted, thereby tripling or quadrupling the CO2 in the atmosphere compared with pre-industrial levels.

The received wisdom was, and perhaps still is, the notion that people don't get motivated by apocalyptic visions. That doesn't apply to me. If there's anything that motivates me to make my own modest contribution to saving humanity's life-support system, it's the thought that our addiction to fossil fuels may bring about a premature end to all human life.

IPCC reports have tended to limit their time horizon to the end of this century. My own hunch is that, if we don't mend our ways, by the end of the century we'll see catastrophic consequences for some people but life carrying on much as before for others. Those of us living in high latitudes may be OK if we manage to grow enough food for ourselves (a big if) and defend our territory against the starving masses trying to escape the unbearable heat nearer the Equator.

Unfortunately, it won't stop there. According to the new paper by Hansen et al, we are heading, perhaps on a longer timescale, to a situation where most of the world is uninhabitable.

Read Joe Romm's posting first and go on to the paper itself if you can. John Medwayhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-92010152430845992662013-04-17T18:33:00.003+01:002013-04-17T18:33:47.642+01:00More from James HansenAs you will have gathered I tend to hang on James Hansen's every word. You can find lots of his recent words in his latest missive.

I was particularly interested to read about his latest thinking on the Venus Syndrome - towards the end of the missive. John Medwayhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-61727568714108098602013-04-02T19:47:00.000+01:002013-04-02T19:47:03.566+01:00The end of an era - Hansen retires from NASAYou can read the full story on the BBC News website.

Hansen has been a big influence on me, particularly since I read his Storms of my Grandchildren, which brought home to me the idea that man-made global warming could trigger a process that brings to an end all life on Earth. In talking about the Venus Syndrome he goes beyond what is currently supported by evidence and he may in time be proved wrong. The problem is that the science doesn't yet seem to have progressed far enough to prove him wrong and so the ultimate catastrophe of the Venus Syndrome is there on the table as a risk we have to take into account.John Medwayhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-45036433479835670222013-03-30T14:22:00.001+00:002013-03-30T14:22:32.259+00:00Yet more on the flatlining An interesting and disturbing paper from James Hansen et al. The message I get from this is that aerosol pollution has increased since 2000, mainly from increased coal-burning, and this has reduced global warming. The CO2 from the coal burning stays in the atmosphere for centuries but the aerosols fall out after about five days. This means that if we were to stop burning coal, or simply clean up the aerosol emissions from burning coal, the rate of global warming would increase immediately. However, if we don't stop burning coal, longer-term global warming will be all the greater because of the increased concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

Aerosol pollution is one possible contributor to the reduction in surface warming but there remain major uncertainties around the size of this contribution. These uncertainties would have been reduced by measurements from a satellite designed to measure aerosol concentrations. Unfortunately, the launch of this satellite failed and there are no plans to replace it.John Medwayhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-11230506634652984132013-03-27T22:28:00.000+00:002013-03-27T22:43:19.354+00:00InequalityIn my last post but one I said I was trying to set up a local study group on sustainability issues. Since then we have had our first meeting and it went well. We decided to devote our next meeting to the subject of inequality. This was partly because the New Economics Foundation (nef) put on an event on the subject recently and one of our number attended it. A resume of the nef take on inequality can be found here.

What has inequality got to do with energy descent and sustainability - apart from the fact that they both appear to be causes associated with the left rather than the right in British politics? My gut feeling is: quite a lot.
It seems to me inevitable that effective action to tackle climate change will ultimately, though perhaps not immediately, depress economic growth. That's before we start thinking about the effects of resource depletion.

Economic growth can, I think, have the effect of depressing the demand for fairness in the way economic rewards are allocated between the different stakeholders in economic enterprises - shareholders, management, workforce, consumers, the rest of society. If my income is rising steadily, I am less likely to worry about other people's income rising faster than if my income is stagnant or falling.

In a sustainable economy, one of the things that needs to be sustained is social cohesion - a society beset by riots, strikes and crime is unlikely to prosper. When sacrifices need to be made, the slogan "We're all in this together" needs to have some substance behind it.

Those are my gut feelings but my gut feelings should not, in themselves, be of much interest to anyone. The important question is whether there is evidence to support my gut feelings.

The famous study by Wilkinson and Pickett, entitled The Spirit Level, has provided some evidence. to support some of my gut feelings on the subject. They claimed, through a series of regressions of inequality against various indicators of social well- and ill-being, that there is generally a positive relationship between equality and indicators of well-being. Furthermore, drawing on other studies, they indicated that the higher levels of well-being in the more equal societies extended right up the income scale - it was not just the poor who benefited.

Their findings have been disputed. Some of the criticism, from right-wing sources, is predictable. I haven't found the time yet (will I ever?) to establish to my own satisfaction, whether there is real substance behind the criticisms. John Medwayhttp://firstname.lastname@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-23614983284465798862013-03-27T22:14:00.000+00:002013-03-27T22:29:47.457+00:00More on the flatlining global temperatureI've commented before on the flatlining global surface temperature. This week I have found two very pertinent articles: first, from the website of The Economist, an extended discussion on that and related matters; second, on the Sceptical Science website, an article claiming that, far from flatlining, global warming has accelerated in recent years. The article, reporting a new paper by Balmaseda, Trenberth, and Källén, explains how much of the surplus heat from the sun is to be found deep in the oceans.

This would appear to confirm what some scientists were predicting five years ago, that natural fluctuations in ocean currents could depress the global surface temperature for about a decade. John Medwayhttp://email@example.com:blogger.com,1999:blog-3704957674843191014.post-84916997329581935292013-02-28T23:04:00.001+00:002013-02-28T23:28:23.178+00:00Gross Domestic ProblemOh dear, it's over a month since I last managed to post anything. It's been a very busy month, including attendance at two book launches, organised by the New Economics Foundation (nef). Following the first one, I arranged with a fellow nef supporter that we would try and organise a local study group in London, where I spend half my time. The idea is to make the study of sustainability issues a more communal activity. Our first meeting is next Wednesday but I've no idea as yet how many people will turn up. My feeling is that if we get four or five people who want to meet up on a regular basis, this will be a success.

The books, incidentally, were Gross Domestic Problem - the politics behind the world's most powerful number by Lorenzo Fioramonti and Cancel the Apocalypse by Andrew Simms.

I've only just got my copy of Cancel the Apocalypse so I can't say anything about it yet, except that Simms is always a good read so I'm looking forward to getting stuck in.

Gross domestic problem is a critique of what Fioramonti sees as our excessive reliance on GDP as almost the sole indicator of our economic well-being. I'm generally with him on that, with the proviso that I think some commentators and politicians put an even more excessive emphasis on the size of the public-sector deficit.

What I found particularly interesting, as a piece of economic history, was the story of the development of GDP during the Second World War and the notion that it was as important as the atomic bomb in bringing victory for the Allies. It enabled the stupendous mobilisation of American resources to the war effort. What I found particularly interesting was the idea that the US government took the view, backed by statistics that make up the measure of GDP, decided to allow the maintenance of high levels of private consumption in order to support the war effort.

This struck me as very counter-intuitive - surely the war effort and domestic consumption are in competition with each other. I suppose that is true in a severely resource-constrained economy, such as the British wartime economy. However, in the lead-up to its entry into the war, the US, with high levels of unemployment, had huge reserves of productive capacity as well as abundant domestic sources of energy and raw materials. Presumably the maintenance of domestic consumption served to preserve the productive infrastructure while the switch to war production, along with the enormous increase in production, took place. As Fioramonti said in response to my question about this, command economies are usually very inefficient whereas the US was able to maintain a predominantly market economy.

I have a feeling that there are lessons lurking here for our long-overdue transition to a low-carbon economy - or perhaps there is a danger of reading the wrong lesson. As we get further into an era of global resource constraint will we find ourselves in something like a British war economy or an American war economy?

Diane Coyle has written a fuller and more critical review of the book. John Medwayhttp://email@example.com


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Our Staff
Our Staff
Our drivers are dedicated to Customer Service and Professionalism. They remain with Blue Bubble for many years as the toplight and signage pays dividends for the number of trips that our drivers get each day.
If you sit at the back of a taxi rank and passengers you will notice that passengers will walk past other taxis to get into a Blue Bubble Cab.
The current Requirements to be a driver at a Blue Bubble Company are:
- A "P" Passenger Endorsement on their Driving Licence with a "Fit & Proper" Person check
- A full driving NZ license for two years,
- Extensive knowledge of the Queenstown and surrounding areas.
- All our drivers also have regular drug and alcohol testing
Some Companies may need you to meet other requirements but the above is the minimum legal requirement.
Also, if our drives hold a Passenger service Licence (PSL) they are able to work for an owner or owners under contract, which can provide for much more flexible arrangements than just being an employee.

subset: commoncrawl


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The Elections Office team is as ready as it can be for Cayman's first-ever referendum, but some work cannot be done until the Legislative Assembly passes a Referendum Law.
Supervisor of Elections Kearney Gomez said he has already recruited the people who will staff the polling stations, which the logistics team can set up within 24 hours.
On Wednesday, Mr. Gomez and Deputy Supervisor of Elections Colford Scott discussed other preparations by the Elections Office. 'We are providing the mechanics of the referendum,' Mr. Gomez said.
What is needed now is a decision about the date in May on which the referendum will take place, so that polling station workers can arrange to be off from their regular employment. A related question for both poll workers and voters is whether the day will be a public holiday, as General Elections are. The Referendum Law will have to address this point.
Employers will need reminding that they are obliged to allow employees reasonable time to vote and they may not make any deductions from pay for that time off.
Also arising is the issue of alcohol. The Elections Law states that no alcohol may be sold or given away from the opening of polls until one hour after the close of polls.
The exact wording of the referendum question must be decided so that the Elections Office can arrange for ballots to be designed and printed.
Once a Referendum Law is in place, Mr. Gomez said, the Elections Office will issue a formal schedule of events, including any deadlines for postal ballots and, possibly, mobile voting.
Meanwhile, the Elections Law will have to be amended to extend voter registration until the end of February for persons to be eligible to vote in May. Otherwise, the registration period will have ended on 1 January.
On the actual day of the referendum, the procedure will be similar to what happens in an election. The polling hours will be the same – 7am to 6pm — and the public will not be allowed to congregate within 100 yards of polling places.
Instead of candidates and agents being in the polling stations as scrutineers, observers appointed in advance will be able to, in Mr. Scott's words, 'see every action of the presiding officer during the polling process.'
Observers will also be allowed during the counting of ballots. Mr. Scott, as returning officer, will be in charge of the counting.
He will announce the outcome in terms of numbers of votes. But, Mr. Gomez emphasised, the Referendum Law must indicate what majority or percentage can be considered a mandate from the people.
Mr. Scott cautioned that some polling places may not be the same as they were for the last election, held in May 2005 – eight months after Hurricane Ivan. Some venues, such as Pedro Castle, were a temporary arrangement because of damage to the buildings usually used.
Polling places will be announced in good time, both men said.
Mr. Gomez moved into the Elections Office on a full-time basis on Monday and will stay there until the end of May. Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of Communications, Works & Infrastructure, he will maintain oversight but has handed over his duties to his deputy, now Acting Permanent Secretary Jennifer Ahearn. Working with her is Ms Leyda Nicholson-Coe.
Working with the Elections Office as another Deputy Supervisor is District Commissioner Ernie Scott in Cayman Brac and Little Cayman.
Mr. Gomez said Deputy Supervisor Orrett Connor would not be involved in Elections Office activities for the referendum because of his position as Cabinet Secretary.
People qualified to vote may register at six locations around Grand Cayman on the next few Saturdays. Registering officers will be at Hurley's in Grand Harbour and all four Foster's Supermarkets from 9am – 1pm.
Staff will also be at Kirk House on Albert Panton Street in downtown George Town from 10am – 2pm.


text: redbeardos 2 Report post Posted March 17 We are having a tournament in Austin starting at noon on April 28th- bring your models and show your mettle! Prizes will be awarded for top scorers and painting entries. Bring some custom terrain and your best painted Malifaux figures for chances to win extra prizes! At: 2438 West Anderson Lane Suite B1 Austin, TX 78757 512-454-2399 1 Share this post Link to post Share on other sites


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Aertker et al v. Placid Holding Company et al
Plaintiff: W. Patrick Aertker, Jr., Betty Aertker Harwood, Deniro, L.L.C. and Southern Interests, L.L.C.
Defendant: Placid Holding Company, Placid Pipeline Company, LLC and Rosewood Refining, LLC
Case Number: 3:2007cv00473
Filed: July 6, 2007
Court: Louisiana Middle District Court
Office: Baton Rouge Office
County: East Baton Rouge
Referring Judge: Christine Noland
Presiding Judge: Ralph E. Tyson
Nature of Suit: Torts to Land
Cause of Action: 28:1332 Diversity-Torts to Land
Jury Demanded By: Plaintiff
Available Case Documents
The following documents for this case are available for you to view or download:
|Date Filed
|Document Text
|September 27, 2012
|FINDINGS OF FACT AND CONCLUSIONS OF LAW. Signed by Judge Carl J. Barbier on 9/27/12. (SEK)
|June 15, 2012
|ORDER: denying 60 MOTION for Summary Judgment filed by Rosewood Refining, LLC, Placid Pipeline Company, LLC, Placid Holding Company. Signed by Judge Carl J. Barbier on 6/15/12. (SEK)
|September 30, 2010
|RULING Adopting 31 Report and Recommendations of the U.S. Magistrate Judge. Defts 24 Motion for Summary Judgment is denied. Signed by Chief Judge Ralph E. Tyson on 9/29/2010. (JDL, )
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Welcome to my new blog. What's this blog about? It's about the side hustle. Those things we all do to make money on the side in addition to your regular job. For example, this blog is a side hustle. I created it to generate a source of income. We'll talk more on that later. I hope to use this blog as a forum to discuss different aspects of the side hustle, which is basically the 5-Ws (Who, What, Where, When and Why).
You came to check out this blog for one of two reasons. You are a friend or fan of mine. (Yes, I got fans. I'm a karaoke BEAST!) Or, money is tight and you are looking for a way to generate some extra income. Believe me, I understand. How do we create some extra income? I'm glad you asked. For the low, low price of $9,999.99… never mind.
There are many different ways to find a side hustle that will make you money. The first thing, we can do is to look at what your hobbies. Things you like to do can possibly provide you with a source of revenue. My hobbies include reading, surfing the web, Zumba, and karaoke (I'm a beast!). I took two of those reading and surfing the web and came up with the idea to do a blog. However, what could I blog about? The idea for this blog came about because I needed a guy to do a graphic for my website.
Then, I thought, there should be a website where people could post their side hustles and I can go to it when I need someone. As, I was putting the site together, I thought of ways I could keep the site current with new content to keep people visiting it and came up with an idea of a blog.
Are you a meticulous with details? Become an event planner. Do you like to cook? Become a caterer. (Never mind. Got that one covered!) Do you like kids? Become a baby sitter. Something you like to do can become your side hustle. Your homework is to figure out how to make money using your hobbies.
Looking to advertise? Check out my website @ http://www.grinding47.com


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(865) 457-1515
375 N. Main St. | Clinton, TN | 37716
Bobby Sutton age 42, of Oliver Springs, TN passed away on Thursday, June 16, 2016 at the Select Specialty Hospital in Powell, TN. He loved his family, and spending time with them. Bobby liked to watch TV, especially the super natural shows. He is preceded in death by his father, Harvey Ray Sutton; and his grandfather whom he was very close to, Cleve Crawford.
Bobby is survived by his wife, Lyn Sutton of Oliver Springs, TN; mother and step father, Karen and Ralph Watzlawick of Heiskell, TN; grandmother, Myra Duncan of Clinton, TN; daughter, Jennifer Nicole Sutton of Knoxville, TN; sister, Toni Sutton of Wisconsin; step sisters, Brandi Watzlawick, and Brittni Watzlawick both of Knoxville, TN; 3 nieces, Desi Sutton, Sierra Lestingi, and Nevaeh Lestingi; various uncles, aunts, and cousins.
In lieu of flowers donations can be made to Jones Mortuary, 375 N. Main Street, Clinton, TN 37716.
Bobby's family and friends will meet at 2:00 pm for a graveside service for him on Saturday, June 18, 2016 at the Hillvale Baptist Church cemetery in Clinton, TN. Jones Mortuary in Clinton, TN is in charge of all arrangements.
375 N. Main St.Clinton, TN 37716
About Us
Funeral Planning
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Looking for something you can't find? We make it easy to get the answers you need. Please feel free to contact us at anytime.


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News about agriculture in New York State and information farmers and consumers can use in their daily lives.
Friday, April 26, 2013
Disaster Assistance Available for Those Hurt by Superstorm Sandy
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has announced disaster aid valued at $209 million to help farmers, land owners and communities recover from the effects of Superstorm Sandy.
Funding is available from the U.S. Department of Agriculture's (USDA) Emergency Conservation Program (ECP), Emergency Forest Restoration Program (EFRP) and Emergency Watershed Protection Program (EWP). The money will help rebuild and repair land damaged due to flooding and other events in 12 states.
The 12 states are: New York, Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia and West Virginia.
The Farm Service Agency has been collecting applications in anticipation of the funding becoming available and will begin providing assistance immediately to eligible landowners. Applications will continue to be accepted through May 31.
For more information on eligibility requirements and applications, go to http://disaster.fsa.usda.gov or visit your nearest Farm Service Agency office.
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I even managed to make a start on the the covers and my pages for my circle journal, although the idea I had in my head hasn't quite come out on paper iykwim??
Sadly it has all come to an end now as I have to brave the rain and head into work this afternoon, but I thoroughly enjoyed my long weekend.
Thought I'd share this as you've already see the photo of the pumpkin itself, of course it had to become a LO and I have an idea to scrap the last three years pumpkin pictures on one LO at some point? Will share some more LO's later in the week, but it is going to be a long one I fear.
see you soon


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