Garbage

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All the time I'm being told how much wasteful packaging we use these days. Well, that's garbage.

The average US household generates about a third less trash each year than the average household in Mexico. The average US trash can is full of packaging, while the average Mexican one – like the average British one or forty years ago – is full of animal and vegetable food waste.

Intensive packaging actually produces less waste. Buy a fresh whole chicken and you end up with about a kilogram of stuff you can't use. Buy processed chicken in about fifteen grams of packaging and there's no waste at all – almost all of the chicken that you don't want to eat is processed into pet food and other products. The same is true of fruit and vegetables.

And why be ashamed of carrying out your processed chicken in a plastic bag? Plastic bags use 40% less energy and generate 80% less solid waste than paper ones. Plastic bags are a quarter of the thickness they were when we started using them in the mid-1970s. They use hardly any oil, and recycling a kilo of plastic takes just 10% of the energy used to recycle a kilo of paper. Paper bags produce 50 times more water pollution. Recycling paper uses bleaches and other nasty industrial chemicals, remember.

And yet the humble, useful plastic bag is on the way out because politicians, for the best of intentions but the worst of reasons, are intimidating supermarkets into scrapping them. Now: which is the real rubbish?

The Future of Oil

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Over the last month, several newspapers have highlighted individuals who are moving away from gas-guzzling cars to more energy efficient alternatives. Some farmers are using donkeys and camels rather than tractors, others are buying smaller cars or even bicycles rather than SUVs, and others are choosing mass-transit. Ford is even changing its line-up in favour of cars with better gas mileage to better suit the market.

Oil prices have risen and fallen over the years, but due to rapid industrialisation in many developing countries, this surge will likely be permanent. Which leaves the question: are these high prices best for the long-term success of the oil companies?

Richard Fletcher doesn’t think so. Many people are making long-term lifestyle changes that are much more energy efficient. New homes have better insulation, windows block heat more effectively, and light bulbs run on less energy. Smaller vehicles are quickly becoming the norm in the United States, just as they have been for years in Europe.

Perhaps most importantly, there has never been a greater incentive than now to develop practical alternative sources of energy. In fact, £500bn will be invested in renewable energy over the next twenty years. May the force (but please, not subsidies) be with anyone who can develop cheap and clean energy.
 

Boris gets tough on climate change… but does he realise it?

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Yesterday Boris Johnson confirmed that he had taken the imminently sensible decision to scrap The Londoner – the taxpayer-funded propaganda sheet that blighted London letter boxes under Livingstone’s mayoralty. Johnson has further announced that he is to use £1m of the £2.9m saving to plant 10,000 ‘street trees’, particularly in London’s poorer, least green communities. Unveiling the initiative Boris explained:

Trees improve the street environment in which Londoners live and work so I will do all I can to save the trees we have and campaign for more trees to protect London’s open spaces.

Well, yes, this is all well and good. But surely on the PR front team Boris have missed a trick here? After all, trees, vegetation and water features in the urban environment – apart from making a more attractive city – work to combat the effects of climate change by dramatically cooling the surroundings. This is why air around the Thames or within urban parks is on average 0.6 degrees Celsius cooler than neighbouring built-up areas. So this tree planting business need not just be about making London prettier but also making it a healthier, more comfortable, greener place to live and work.

Boris should tell his detractors in the green lobby to put that in their rizla and smoke it.

Green hypocrisy

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Tim Ball, who received a Phd in climatology from the University of London and teaches at the University of Winnipeg, was accused of "getting money from the oil companies" because he is sceptical that green house gases cause global warming. The Union of Concerned Scientists and other agencies accuse respected scientists of the same crime.

Time will answer the ifs, hows, and whys of global warming. We may or may not be in danger of melting ice, but we are definitely in danger of alarmist hypocrisy. Several industries already receive huge subsidies, including the corn farmers, and other special interest groups and green companies are lining up fast.

Will these green economic policies be effective? According to the Wall Street Journal:

An estimate by the International Energy Agency holds that, to ward off the worst of climate change, the world by 2030 must build 34 hydroelectric dams the size of China's Three Gorges Dam, 510 nuclear plants, 289,000 wind turbines, 6,800 biomass plants and 714 fossil fuel plants equipped with unproven CO2 capture technology.

Will this happen? Considering more nuclear power plants have been decommissioned than built in the last decade and that locations for dams that size are scarce, it seems unlikely. So why the speeches and promises from McCain and Obama (and let's not forget Ken Livingstone)?

Real solutions are lacking so politicians can only devote themselves to telling voters what they want to hear… Then what, as a practical matter, would be the aim of global warming policy? Our political system permits only one answer: to please the special interests that even now are gathering at the trough for subsidies in the name of climate change.

So while environmentalists accuse scientists of being paid off by oil companies, they’ll pad their own wallets with subsidies from the government.

Want to get high?

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Researchers at Boeing Phantom have predicted that in twenty years it will be entirely normal to travel to work in plane-car hybrids. The hybrid will be able to travel up to 300 miles and, thanks to a computerised 'flight instructor', it will take minimal skill and concentration.

Powered by electricity and or batteries, it will run on relatively clean technology. However, given the freedom and fun that the hybrid will introduce, I'm sure the ecofascists will find a way of criticising the enterprise.

With green extremists still intent on prophesising doomsday visions of future, it is good to see the normally complicit BBC report on how technology can improve the environment. After all, technological innovation has meant that most humans no longer consider dying at thirty to be normal.

Boeing's vision is entirely likely. A Slovenian company, Pipistrel, will be delivering the first commercially produced two-seater electric aircraft, it runs on a lithium-polymer battery which can be recharged in the time it will take as long as a mobile phone.

As the work Positive Environmentalism from the Globalisation Institute clearly argues, technology offers the surest way to protect the environment. Surely it is about time that this was acknowledged by politicians, the media and society at large.

Sending me back to think again

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Jim Manzi has managed to get me to at least rethink one of my long held beliefs about climate chaange and what we should do about it. Rethink still, not quite change my mind.

My basic position has always been that climate change is indeed happening and that we now need to look at the economics of the situation: it's not, as many insist, either an immediate or catastrophic problem, rather a low level and chronic one. Thus I reject the Gore and other catastrophists (including the Stern Review) thoughts that we need swinging carbon taxes (or cap and trade agreements) now: I'm rather more inclined to the Nordhaus view that low carbon taxes now, with a road map for their gradual rise over the decades, will provide the incentives for the necessary changes. Such taxation being, of course, revenue neutral, so that other taxes should fall as they are imposed. One thing that rather underlies my complacency about such taxation is that on things like air travel and oil we already have the necessary levels of green taxation recommended: not just by Nordhaus, but by Stern. So we've already done what we needed to do, we just need to wait the time that such changes in relative prices will take to influence behaviour as the stock of cars, heating systems and the like is replaced.

I'm also aware of the Hayek point: that we can't actually know what, exactly, the correct level of such taxation should be, but again, low and gradually rising taxation doesn't worry me all that much, not over decades.

However, Manzi goes further and makes me think that quite possibly I'm wrong in all of the above. That is, that the political system is so disfunctional, so appallingly corrupted by special interest pleading, that it will never be possible to roll out such carbon taxation across the economy without the price soaring above any possible benefits. If he's right, and he is indeed very convincing, then that leaves only one path we can possibly logically follow.

Technological development and whatever adaptation we need to do to fill in the gaps. I can't say that that worries me either really: my day job is on the fringes of said technological development and the one thing we really do know about human beings is that we adapt pretty well.

All of that said, I do urge you to read Manzi's post. Perhaps this is another of these problems which is simply too important to be left to politics?

Deceitful Darling

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Yesterday The Times led with the revelation that the government is introducing a secret tax that will add £200 to cost of many family cars:

Tens of thousands of families will have to pay up to £245 extra a year under new road tax rules after a covert government decision to include cars up to seven years old.

This move is entirely deceitful. If car buyers had known at the time of purchase that buying a car that emits over 225g of carbon dioxide per kilometre would mean such an added cost, they might have thought twice before acquiring it.

As Chancellor, Gordon Brown steered clear of such dishonesty. However, as Prime Minister he has allowed this retroactive policy to be initiated under his watch. Originally cars bought previous to March 23 2006 were exempt from the tax, but Alistair Darling in the last budget announced a new series of car tax bands that rescind the previous exemption, leaving the already over-taxed motorist with even less money in their pocket. The Automobile Association (AA) claims that this will push many people into negative equity because the value of these cars on the second-hand market will now be worth thousands of pounds less than the car owner’s outstanding loans.

Given the rising fuel, utilities and food costs such a stealth tax is plain wrong. The people it will hit are families; these are not super cars but family cars, chosen not for their power but their safety record. Take a look at the EURO NCAP safety standards for the Renault Espace, the Vauxhall Zafira and the Ford Galaxy; three cars that will now be heavily taxed.

What, you may ask is Alistair Darling’s response to hardworking families hit by another stealth tax? Upon being asked in a radio interview what those facing higher car taxes, his answer was that to suggest that they should by new cars. Maybe if you stop taxing us, Darling, we might be able to.

Will biofuel scam derail environmentalism?

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The unintended cosequences of climate change alarmism are growing clearer by the day. Prices for wheat are 60 percent higher than a year ago – resulting in soaring bread prices of around 36 percent per year. This is primarily due to agricultural land being used for biofuel production (which now takes up 30 percent of American agricultural capacity). Bread riots, a red light for every regime since time imemorial, toppled the government in Haiti a few days ago and are spreading across the world. Similar developments have triggered protests and riots in countries ranging from Africa, India, Indonesia and Afghanistan.

Alarmed by this, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, India, Inonesia, Vietnam and Argentina have restricted food exports in order to feed their own populaces. Even in the US, probably not much longer the bread basket of the world, rationing of food has begun over the last 6 weeks. Bloggers in New York are relating amazing stories:

I've heard that rice, flour, beans, and cooking oil are the main items being rationed at places like Pathmark, ShopRite, and Costco. One friend who lives in Flushing mentioned that she was not allowed to purchase more than one 25lb sack of rice in a local grocery. As far as I know, the main neighborhoods being rationed so far are all in the outer Boroughs (Queens, Bronx, Jersey City, parts of Brooklyn, and Harlem).

In silicon valley you could not buy more than one big sack of rice last week. With the growing media coverage of food shortages and related unrest abroad, the already protectionist mood among Americans has lead to calls for a moratorium on wheat exports. American bakery owners marched on Congress last month demanding to curtail wheat exports to give them some relief. Thanks to the collapse of the American dollar it's becoming cheaper for foreigners to buy out US supplies. Bread and butter issues are increasingly likely to become an issue in this November presidential election.

Some kind of privatization

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On the news that train fares are to be simplified, I think Damian Hockney (possibly the leader of the One London Party, though I can't be sure) made a good point in a letter to Friday's Metro:

YES, let's all cheer that rail travel will become even more expensive. Let's all leap around and bang the drums to celebrate that all the "confusion" invloved in booking really cheap, early tickets will be scrapped and that we will have less choice. Next, let's stop all that "confusion" in other things like telecoms competition, and then we can go back to the good old days when you had to wait nine months to get a phone installed.

Essentially, the Association of Train Operating Companies has decided that the current ticket pricing structure, under which some companies offer as many as 12 different types of ticket, will be scrapped in favour of a system with just three options: advance, off-peak and anytime. Now, that may simply be good business practice - i.e. what consumers want - in which case, fine. But I suspect that this simplification will just be used as an excuse to raise ticket prices accross the board. Imagine if the supermarkets got together and decided that they would all only offer three particular kinds of, say, milk at three different prices. That would probably be regarded as an anti-competitive practice - sellers clubbing together to offer buyers less choice, and therefore get away with charging more for the product.

On the other hand, it's really no wonder that train operators are desperate to squeeze as much money out of passengers as possible. 40 percent of tickets sold have their prices capped by the government, which is to say that 40 percent of a train operator's business may take place at below market prices. They need to make up for that somehow. The reality is that some tickets - those on busy routes at peak times - should become more expensive, while others should probably be much cheaper. It's supply and demand. Such a pricing structure would also act to encourage people to travel at quieter moments, rather than all pile onto the train at 8.30am with everyone else. It is ridiculous that more than a decade after the privatization of the railways, the government is still preventing this from happening.

Common Error No. 99

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99. "We should switch all our energy to derive from renewable sources."

This is not a practical proposition from the standpoint of either cost or technology. Wind-power is uneconomic without subsidies, and involves huge energy expenditure in construction and maintenance of its wind farms. Rooftop windmills in urban areas, for example, take more energy to produce than they themselves generate. Since winds are unreliable, wind power necessitates huge back-up sources to be on standby.

Solar technology used to use the silicon rejected by the computer industry, but now high purity silicon is being manufactured specifically for power generation. However, this is a heavily energy intensive process, undermining the energy payback from the technology. Although great strides are being made here and it looks as if solar power could be price competitive in a decade, it still won't provide a steady flow of power, nor the concentrations of power needed for industry.

Biofuels currently use food crops such as wheat and maize, and drive up prices, affecting poor people most. The US and the EU have gone for them as an easy option that pleases the farm lobby, but they are not efficient. The crops it takes to fill the tank of a 4x4 with biofuels would feed someone for a year. Many also maintain (Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth amongst them) that they produce more emissions than they replace. If technology can obtain biofuels from plant waste and cellulose, they will be a more viable source, but this might be years away.

A more realistic approach would accompany research into efficient renewable sources with technology to use fossil fuel cleanly so that coal-fired power stations, for example, can capture the carbon produced. Clean fossil fuel technology can give abundant, secure and low-cost energy, which renewable sources currently cannot.