The Conservatives' defence spokesman, Dr Liam Fox, is a worried man. Not just because the UK has more attack aircraft in the RAF museum at Hendon that it has flying in the RAF. As he told the Economic Research Council the other day, he sees trouble brewing over energy security.
He argued that 90 percent of the world's oil comes from undemocratic countries, which is asking for trouble. And a fair proportion of that has to come through some pretty narrow straits and canals that are obvious targets for terrorists.
Fox believes that NATO - which unlike the EU does not exclude Norway (a large producer) and Turkey (a major transit country) - is maybe better placed to deal with the issues of energy security. But liberalizing its own energy markets is maybe a good first step. We can't afford the present inefficiencies.
Meanwhile Russia is using its energy strength as an instrument of foreign policy. Gerhard Schroeder, whose government underwrote a €1bn loan to Gazprom just before he left office, for a pipeline project (which he now sits on the board of.) The Ukrainians and others have felt the heat - or rather the cold - when Moscow turned off energy supplies. Even Norway is beefing up its navy because it feels it can't trust the Russians. Maybe planting a flag on the seabed was not just a stunt.
But the lack of investment in upstream gas production in Russia, thinks Fox, might well lead to future shortages, even if Russian malevolence does not. That puts the UK, with its declining North Sea production, and at the end of all the pipelines, in a dangerous place.
Maybe its' time we started being nicer to the Canadians, with all their oil sands, uranium and hydro-electric power.
Are pay-as-you-throw rubbish charges a tax, or not? This is a question that seems to be occupying the Daily Mail at the moment...
The government has been very careful not to refer to the proposed charges as taxes, preferring to term them 'incentives'. But now environment minister Joan Ruddock has apparently told MPs: "I have just been told by that technically these charges are regarded by the Treasury as a form of tax." Unfortunately, she may be right. But that's because the pay-as-you-throw scheme being trialled by the government is not really a pay-as-you-throw scheme at all.
A proper scheme could work as follows: refuse collection is privatized; people choose from a number or competing refuse collection companies; people pay according to how much refuse they have to dispose of; council tax bills are reduced accordingly. Such a system would encourage people to produce less waste, encourage more recycling, and lead to a higher quality of service (if people were not getting enough collections, for instance, they could change to a different company). With lower taxes and competing service providers, you would get better value for money too.
The government's scheme, by contrast, seems to consist of fining people who don't recycle, and (just possibly) giving a limited council tax rebate to people who do 'go green'. It's is another example of politicians getting their hands on an economically sensible idea, messing it up, and making it unpopular with the general public. And that makes it much harder for the original, better idea to be implemented.
Global warming is allegedly coming faster than even the most alarmist campaigners expected. They have once again had a field day in bashing America, for its insistence that big emerging polluters should come on board the bus to mitigate climate change. This is a classical example of Alexis de Tocqueville's law: once the dynamics of an insurgency have been unleashed it is unlikely to be settled by compromise even if the reigning powers want to — instead they spoil it with escalating demands.
In any case, there is probably no need for all this fuss about short–term emission cuts. Just allow the market to do the job.
There is now evidence that the US approach, with prizes for the invention of low carbon technology, is actually working. Recently the Bush Administration announced that U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide fell by 1.8 percent with all greenhouse emissions down 1.5 percent from 2005 to 2006 even though the economy grew by 2.9 percent.
This reduction was accomplished through prizes and greater use of lower carbon energy sources. We know that most EU countries are failing to achieve their Kyoto commitments and yet even those who do manage to meet their Kyoto-set targets tend to do so for reasons other than climate change mitigation politics such as the breakdown of socialist economies.
The EU hasn't yet released figures for 2006. But from 2000 to 2005, the U.S outperformed Western Europe. Carbon emissions were up 3.8 percent in the so-called EU-15 during those years, versus 2.5 percent in the U.S.
The funny thing is: the same is true for Al Gore. It was during his time as Vice–President in the early 1990s that U.S. greenhouse emissions grew faster than Europe's. Bush, on the other hand, has managed to turn this around.
Newcastle's Professor Ian Fells was our guest at a Power Lunch here yesterday. As an engineer and energy expert, he's flabbergasted at this week's announcement from the government that every home in Britain will be fed by wind energy by 2020, thanks to a new 25-gigawatt wave of offshore wind turbines. Fells points out that most government announcements on energy since around 2000 have been - well, confused, to put it politely.
Quite so. The chance of the UK reaching their targets of 20 percent renewable energy by 2020, or a 60 percent cut in CO2 by 2050 are roughly zero. Presently we have about 1500 wind turbines generating just 1 percent of our electricity. You will need a lot of new turbines to increase that significantly. And when you do build them, remember that you will also have to strengthen parts of the national grid to cope. And planing authorities don't much like the idea of lots of new pylons crossing the landscape.
When it comes to offshore wind power, the costs are largely unknown, and the kit needed to build on that scale doesn't exist. The trouble with wind power is that quite often, the wind isn't blowing; and when it is, it isn't blowing hard enough to make turbines work at peak efficiency. So you need more turbines than you think to generate the power you need. Fells reckons it means erecting ten turbines a day to meet the government targets, and he can't see how that is feasible. After all, they are each bigger than the London Eye, and that took years to build.
Turbines are great for pumping water in Australia, or charging your batteries in Antarctica. But as a power source for an industrialized country that is completely dependent on electricity – the computers, the waterworks, the tills, the rail signals and just about everything else goes off when the power fails – it's hardly something we can rely on. So why are we making such grand commitments? Well, politicians want to seem green. And with nine different energy ministers in the last decade, it's probably that none of them really understand the costings and engineering. So they throw £1bn of our money each year on renewables that wouldn't exist without that largesse. We should concentrate on security of supply (and new nuclear capacity is probably the cheapest way of doing that) - then the rest will follow.
The Economistcarries an interesting article about road pricing this week, based on the RAC foundation's latest forecast of traffic growth. By 2041, their report says, demand for road space will have increased by 37 percent due to economic and population growth. Given the steady decline in road-building over the last twenty years, and the UK's already clogged-up infrastructure, the future sounds like it is going to be very congested indeed.
This need not be the case. Standstill Britain could easily be averted by a sensible transport policy, which would make addressing both the supply of and the demand for roads a priority. Increasing the supply of roads is simple - it means building more of them. And the best method of regulating demand and allocating road capacity is well established too - road pricing.
The trouble is, both of these policies have encountered noisy opposition. The environmentalists get worked up about new roads (never mind the fact that less congestion equals lower emissions) preferring to force us onto inadequate and crowded public transport. Motorists do not seem to like the idea of paying for road space either - a petition against road-pricing on the Downing Street website attracted 1.8 million signatures.
The explanation may lie in the woefully unimpressive way the government made the case for road-pricing. They failed to point out that pricing would replace other road taxes, rather than add to them, or that many people (rural or off-peak drivers) would actually end up paying less under the new system. Then again, perhaps no one would have believed them anyway, given the current Prime Minister’s affinity to stealth taxes.
The RAC's report recommends a very sensible (and potentially popular) scheme. Fuel duty would be scrapped, and replaced with a 14 pence/l 'carbon charge'. Then motorists would pay per kilometre according to how busy the road was. I would add something to this: the money collected should fund improvement and expansion of the road network. If you are going to make motorists pay, it's only fair to give them something in return.
I have to admit that things like this make me laugh like a drain :
It has become the home improvement of choice for the environmentally aware, but erecting a wind turbine on the side of your house could create more carbon dioxide than it actually saves, a study into their performance will reveal today.
Clearly, I have a slightly warped sense of humour.
The point is though that the amount of electricity generated, and thus the emissions "saved", is too small. It doesn't make up for the emissions involved in the manufacture of the machinery in the first place. Thus, outside places like Wick (I knew the place had to be good for something), having such a windmill increases, rather than reduces, total emissions. Clearly not what we want to happen at all.
Now of course, given that David Cameron is the only man in the Kingdom known to actually have one, the total effect isn't all that large. However, there's a deeper point at issue here. If we're going to try to save emissions by using this or that technology, then we've got to make sure that we actually do the cost benefit analysis. For example, we are repeatedly told that nuclear has, over the whole fuel cycle, CO 2 emissions: something which is absolutely true. What does not follow is that we shouldn't use nuclear to reduce emissions. For such emissions are lower than those from coal and gas (as should be obvious). More than that though, they're actually about the same as those from onshore wind power, and less than half those from solar PV. To say that we shouldn't use nuclear because of such emissions is also to say that we shouldn't use the other two for the same reason: not quite what those drawing our attention to the CO2 and nuclear issue really want us to conclude.
I really do love this piece in The Guardian about solar power. Almost all of it is an interesting overview of where the science is now and thus where the technology will be in a decade or so. It's all very encouraging indeed: the scientists seem confident that they'll be able to get generation costs from solar down to around and about the same as that from fossil fuels.
Something which will, of course, make a lot of the worries about climate change go away. Of course, this being The Guardian there's the note of doom as well:
But waiting around for the science to become technology isn't an option, says Martyn Williams, senior parliamentary campaigner at Friends of the Earth. "We are aware of moves to find new ways to generate electricity from solar power. We have to move faster than that because every tonne of carbon we pump out is adding to the problem."
So Williams' idea is that we should spend a lot of money now on bad technology now rather than wait for the technology which actually works. That is, we should make ourselves vastly poorer now than we need to be, reducing what we can spend upon the technology when it is ready.
But what really fascinates me about all of this is that if you go back and read Bjorn Lomborg's Skeptical Environmentalist again, his argument about climate change rested upon the following. Somewhere in the 2030-2040 time span, solar power will become cheaper than generation using fossil fuels. At that point we'll all naturally switch: and none of the models used by the IPCC acknowledge this fact (well, prediction perhaps). So all of the predictions of future emissions are too high (again, possibly).
Now as you might recall, Lomborg got a lot of stick for this argument, and it does look like he was wrong. Too pessimistic that is, not too optimistic, for that magic price moment looks like it might appear before 2020.
While there are an awful lot of people who say they like solar power, I have a feeling that if this comes to pass there'll be a few at least who won't be happy. Cheap renewable power will allow the whole capitalist/consumerist juggernaut to carry on which isn't the point at all for some people.
As we know, Gordon Brown has announced that we're all about to be free from the great plastic bag tyranny. No longer will great gobbets of oil be used to manufacture them, emissions will fall and we'll all be ushered onwards to the Gaian Nirvana.
Except, at least if Dominic Lawson is correct here, that's not what will actually happen :
The only problem with that is that plastic bags, though undeniably irritating when left lying around, are essentially the by-product, rather than the cause, of fossil fuel generation. Approximately 98 per cent of every barrel of oil, once refined, is consumed as petrol or diesel. If the remaining two per cent of naphtha was not used for packaging, it would almost certainly be flared off – which is pure waste.
Ah, so we're going to get the emissions anyway, without the convenience of the plastic bags, plus we'll get the emissions from whatever we all use instead: paper or perhaps sturdier reusable cotton or something. This really doesn't sound like something that's going to be beneficial to the environment, however well it might play to certain sections of the voting public.
I'm reminded of the phrase "Don't just do something, stand there!" For whenever people in government do have these bright ideas about what do about climate change, as with bio-fuels , they manage to make the problem worse, act entirely counter-productively.
It was no great surprise to hear from the Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly this week that consultations are to begin on proposals for the expansion of Heathrow airport. Among the options to be examined are proposals for a 2,200m third runway and a sixth terminal.
The announcement that consultations are to begin on the expansion of Heathrow Airport has reignited the old debate between those who seek to defend the countryside and those who favour the benefits of increased air travel. These plans – which include the destruction of an entire village to make way for terminal six– have proved particularly controversial.
The issue is a difficult one. On the one hand, good airport infrastructure is vital in a globalized economy. A lack of capacity can prove damaging to economic competitiveness, whereas greater air travel can aid growth. On the other hand, the rights of property owners and communities in rural areas deserve protection.
Ultimately, the flaw lies in the premise of the debate – that this is a matter for the government to negotiate a compromise on. Indeed, the very existence of such a heated argument is a result of the decision lying in politically motivated planners’ hands.
It should be up to the airport to negotiate with local residents and landowners to try and find a solution that works for all concerned. Their interests cannot possibly be understood or represented by disconnected Westminster politicians. Where agreement cannot be reached, it should be for the common law to ensure fair and just compensation for parties affected by the expansion. Judges are far better at balancing the competing claims of neighbours than government.
When I was in Edinburgh last week, I went to have a look at the Scottish Parliament building. I had seen pictures of it, of course, but wanted to reserve judgement until I had viewed it myself. The question is, how well spent was the British taxpayer's £414.4 million (the original budget estimate was £10-40 million)?
In my opinion, not well at all. The Scottish Parliament is without doubt one of the most monstrous buildings I've seen – and I tend to like modern architecture. It may be pleasant on the inside, but the exterior looks like a misshapen concrete block with bits of bamboo randomly stuck on it. I'm told the design was based on up-turned ships, which explains a lot and is, perhaps, symbolic.
Anyway, the Scottish Parliament building got me thinking about town planning. One of the arguments commonly made in favour of our restrictive planning system is that without it, there would be a free for all, with ugly, poorly designed buildings popping up all over the place. But the Scottish Parliament wasn't just approved by government, it was built for government. And it's hideous.
Look at the rest of Edinburgh. New Town, a wonderful example of Georgian architecture at its best, was a privately planned development (street layout aside), just like the equally picturesque Bath. Developers made the buildings attractive because they wanted people to buy them. Compare that with the council estates that surround Edinburgh (and other great Northern cities). Built by the state after development rights were nationalised in 1947, little regard was given to the people who would be living in them, and they have been regretted ever since.
It's time we finally returned planning and development to the free market. There can be little doubt it does a better job than the state.
The Conservatives' defence spokesman, Dr Liam Fox, is a worried man. Not just because the UK has more attack aircraft in the RAF museum at Hendon that it has flying in the RAF. As he told the Economic Research Council the other day, he sees trouble brewing over energy security.
Are pay-as-you-throw rubbish charges a tax, or not? This is a question that seems to be 
Newcastle's Professor Ian Fells was our guest at a Power Lunch here yesterday. As an engineer and energy expert, he's flabbergasted at this week's announcement from the government that every home in Britain will be fed by wind energy by 2020, thanks to a new 25-gigawatt wave of offshore wind turbines. Fells points out that most government announcements on energy since around 2000 have been - well, confused, to put it politely. 
The Economist 
I have to admit that things like this make me laugh like 
I really do love this piece in The Guardian about 
It was no great surprise to hear from the Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly this week that consultations are to begin on proposals for the expansion of Heathrow airport. Among the options to be examined are proposals for a 2,200m third runway and a sixth terminal.
When I was in Edinburgh last week, I went to have a look at the Scottish Parliament building. I had seen pictures of it, of course, but wanted to reserve judgement until I had viewed it myself. The question is, how well spent was the British taxpayer's £414.4 million (the original budget estimate was £10-40 million)?