Poverty causes pollution

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poverty-causes-pollution

We often hear about how it is our unbridled consumption which causes the pollution causing Gaia to choke on our wastes. We much more rarely hear (although we do our best around here) the point that a clean environment is actually a luxury good. It's something we buy after we've worked out how to feed and clothe ourselves. Proof of this particular pudding comes from some new research:

Burned wood and animal waste are the chief constituents of a "brown cloud" of pollution that has caused illness and death in southern Asia, scientists have discovered. For years the huge toxic sooty cloud has descended on southern Asia and the Indian Ocean during the winter months, hanging in the air for days or weeks at a time. The cloud has been traced to many deaths in China and India from heart and lung diseases. But until now experts have not been sure what it is made of. Two possible sources were the burning of fossil fuels, such as coal and oil, or of "biomass", such as wood and animal dung. The new research shows beyond doubt that smallscale home fires in which wood and animal waste is burned for heating and cooking are primarily responsible for the cloud.

The reason for that brown cloud is thus that people are poor. They're burning wood and dung to cook with, on inefficient stoves to boot (using a resource inefficiently is a useful definition of the cause of poverty by the way).

If they were richer they would, as we do, have electric or gas stoves and that brown could wouldn't exist.

Sorry, but it really isn't true that wealth is what causes pollution: it's poverty. Both in that what the poor consume creates pollution and in that only with wealth do we have the resources to use less polluting alternatives. So, how ever much some might object to the idea, the way to clean up the world is to promote economic growth.

Mutiny on the Rails

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Are the rail franchise operators heading for ruin? You could be forgiven for thinking so if you have read the papers this week. The Independent reported that, “Rail passengers face cut in services as recession bites”, while similarly The Guardian reported that, “Railway firms ask Hoon for state aid as years of growth hit the buffers”. But is any of this true?

At the meeting with the Transport Secretary, this week, the top five transport operators (Stagecoach, National Express, Go-Ahead, Arriva and FirstGroup) on the rail network apparently asked for a “bailout”. The Guardian raised the spectre of shorter trains and subsidy payments for an extra 1,000 staff, while The Independent, waded in with claims of shorter trains and higher prices. However, according to the Association of Train Operating Companies, “The specific ideas reported (in the Guardian) were not raised with the Department, but train companies underlined both their commitment to deliver quality services to passengers and their willingness to contribute actively to the economic recovery of the UK.”

What is needed in these times is an elastic market that can react efficiently to demand. What we have of course is the exact opposite. A market, riddled with contractual obligations for the good times but little room for manoeuvre during a “downturn” (if you can call 5% passanger growth a downturn). Rail operators need flexibility to operate efficiently, the repeated need to ask Geoff Hoon if they can and can’t do something has meant that since 1997 the railways have come no further than than they were in 1939. Rail franchise operators should start operating how they want, and ignore the consequences that the government tries to heap on them. It is a shame that Dagny Taggart isn’t in charge of any of these rail operators.

Flying high

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Their heads rose from amongst the manure strewn cabbage patch as the rumbling sounds grew ever louder. The bright shiny tubes ascended to the heavens.  Distracted from their picnic on the heath by the disturbance, Islington's middle classes were under threat. Both of these groups have found a common ground. They hate the idea of Heathrow expanding. The former because they believe that their cabbages will wilt. The latter,  wealthy enough to travel regardless of cost, are tangled in a web of armchair environmentalism.

What of one of the common claims that it will drastically increase carbon dioxide emissions? Well as things stand, the UK’s total aviation emissions (including non-UK flights, 2006 figures) stands at 6.4%, or 36  million tonnes. To put this into perspective, that’s 0.128% of the total global COs emissions. Even if one runway increases aviation’s carbon dioxide output by 100% it will stand at a quarter of a percent of the total global output. Over the next decades aeroplanes are destined to become quieter (excepting the A380) and cleaner, as airlines respond to demand from users, airlines and people on the ground.

We now have to suffer at the hands of their crass stunts for the next few years as billions of our money is wasted on attempting to achieve the building of a runway.

The importance of sunk costs

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George Monbiot manages, surprisingly, to address the correct point here:

That the Conservatives, following the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, can outflank Labour so easily on this issue shows how attached the governing party has become to "sunk costs". By this I mean the lobbying power of companies which have already made their investments and want to squeeze every last drop out of them before they expire.

George Monbiot has, unsurprisingly, however managed to address it in the wrong manner.

Now it is true that it's a fundamental tenet of decision making that you shouldn't consider sunk costs. What you've already spent on something shouldn't cloud your judgement as to whether you should spend more on it, for example. Throwing good money after bad is not to be recommended after all.

However, we do indeed want to think about the type of sunk costs that George is referring to when we adress the thorny subject of climate change. The cost of whatever it is that we do (assuming that we do anything at all) is going to be massively influenced by whether we think about all of the investments we have already made or not. No, not quite "sunk costs" in the sense of those we shouldn't be thinking about but the costs we have sunk in assets that are still viable, still operating.

Whatever it is that we do to create non (or low) carbon emission energy generation, just as an example, should be done in sync with the requirement to replace our current energy generation system as it wears out. We shouldn't simply tear down what works now and replace: we should wait until it needs to be torn down anyway and then replace with whatever new system we decide upon. This is true of all of the various measures suggested. We really don't want to throw away hundreds of billions of pounds worth of currently operating infrastructure and build it all again: we want to wait until we have to replace it in the normal cycle and then do it in the new manner.

And it isn't just "companies" which want to squeeze every last drop out of such things. We all want to get those last drops for it is we who have paid for the originals (people being the only people who can actually pay for anything, companies simply being a convenient legal fiction) and we who will have to pay for the new.

If we throw away hundreds of billions of assets that are still adequate and functioning then we will make ourselves poorer by precisely those hundreds of billions we are throwing away. Which really doesn't sound like a very good idea.

EU to vote on killing Africans

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Next Tuesday, the European Parliament is going to vote on legislation which could ban around a quarter of pesticides in the EU. Gordon Brown, Hilary Benn, along with farmers and industry have denounced the legislation’s spurious scientific grounds and its potential consequences; lower yields, increased food prices and a fatal blow to crops like carrots.

But it seems as though the EU isn’t just shooting itself in the foot; a new report by the Campaign for Fighting Diseases reveals that the legislation could also undermine the market for public health insecticides and seriously damage the fight against malaria in Africa.

Insecticides are vital for controlling malaria, a disease which claims over one million lives every year, mostly in young children.

Insecticide markets are based almost entirely on crop protection; public health insecticides represent only around one percent of the total pesticides market. Without the agricultural market, production for public health will almost certainly become unsustainable. Insecticides will become harder to get a hold of and more expensive. There will also be little incentive for industry to invest in research and development of new insecticides.

It is also likely that the EU will apply import restrictions so that foreign producers are subject to the same conditions as EU farmers. This trade barrier will leave countries with the terrible choice of banning public health insecticides or losing the lucrative EU market for exports.

This legislation runs against EU support to eradicate malaria and encourage agricultural exports from Africa. The EU is putting spurious environmentalism before people.

Solving climate change for $2 billion

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solving-climate-change-for-2-billion

Now this is a piece of research into climate change that I can really get behind. It's one of those win/win policies that environmentalists like to tell us are out there. It might even be "no cost" for the value of the fisheries created might be more than the cost of doing the work, the climate change effect coming for free.

OK, OK, reality time, this is very much early stage work and no, we don't know how effective it is going to be.

As a result of the findings, a ground-breaking experiment will be held this month off the British island of South Georgia, 800 miles south east of the Falklands. It will see if the phenomenon could be harnessed to contain rising  carbon emissions. Researchers will use several tons of iron sulphate to create an artificial bloom of algae. The patch will be so large it  will be visible from space. Scientists already knew that releasing iron into the sea stimulates the growth of algae. But environmentalists had warned that to do so artificially might damage the planet’s fragile ecosystem.

We know very well that the basic idea works. Large areas (up to 70% of the global ocean) of the sea are nutrient poor, specifically iron poor. We can see what results when there's a storm in the Sahara for example, and iron rich dust gets blown over the Atlantic: algal blooms. Some such algae, when they die, fall to the ocean floor and lock up the carbon they contain. Others become the beginning of a food chain that results in lots more yummy tuna for us to eat. So, if we deliberately throw iron into the ocean can we create such blooms, such richer fisheries and such carbon sequestration? 

As I say, we know that this basic idea does in fact work, we just don't know how well. We do know that there won't be any appalling side effects, for we actually did this once before: all that soot and slag from all those coal fired ships for a century or so did not lead to catastrophe after all (and yes, they did create areas of higher nutrients and thus more algal growth). But what we want to find out is how much of that carbon captured from the atmosphere goes to the bottom of the ocean and how much goes right back, either from the algae themselves or the fish (and us! Yum!) that feed upon them? A commercial company called Planktos that wanted to conduct this very experiemnt a could of years back thought that 20% was sequestrated for the long term.

20%? On a blog a long time ago and far away I ran through these numbers. Given the cost of iron powder (or as here, iron sulphate) the cost of sequestrating one tonne of carbon would be around 3.3 US cents. Yes, that really is 0.033 of a dollar. To sequestrate all of the 5 billion tonnes of current anthropogenic emissions would thus cost under $2 billion dolllars. Erm, in raw material costs.

Yes, of course, these numbers are wrong. Entirely wrong, very much back of a fag packet wrong. Let's say they're an order of magnitude out. Still costs less than $20 billion annually. Two orders out: still less than $200 billion. Even that, as an annual cost, pales into insignificance against the cost of, say, the Stern Review's prescriptions.

OK, let's imagine that this is indeed wrong. That there's some error (in my calculations, in the basic idea itself perhaps). That still leaves us with a very large question. Why is only one experiment being done upon this? We're being asked to spend trillions upon trillions of dollars over the next few years to "beat climate change" so why isn't everyone and their granny investigating such possibly low cost methods of doing so?

Thre's a cynical little voice in me that says that it's because there's an awful lot of people who aren't as interested in solving climate change as they are in using it as an excuse to impose their vision of the good life upon us.

Technical difficulties

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I should have known better than to rely on the Circle Line on Thursday evening, but you only live once. As the man down on his luck picks up with quivering hand the weighty revolver to take that chance at Russian roulette, in a rush to get from Westminster to Barbican I followed the Delphic Oracle of TFL Journey Planner and jumped with trepidation onto the shaky tube.

Approaching Tower Hill we were hit like a bullet and came to a complete stop. After a couple of minutes came over the speakers. Apparently we were having technical difficulties. And then silence…

After fifteen minutes the voice was back. The technicals were still difficult, but all will be fine. She cannot move the train without authorisation from her superior. As such Mr or Mrs superior will need to catch a train heading in the other direction, board this train and cast the magic spell needed to get the cattle truck moving again. A wise guy in the carriage shouted: “So we drive trains by committee do we?” We laughed, but the frustration was growing. And then, once more, silence…

Another fifteen minutes and the voice from above had one Herculean Labour before this lump of metal could move. She would have to come through the train, reverse it back a few metres, and then goback through the train; then freedom would be ours. Another wise guy suggested that this was a trip she should not make, we laughed, though the smell of blood was in the air.

With this final mission complete, she thanked us for our patience. Little did she know how close she came to wrath of the mob. The line between civilization and terror was almost crossed. We had two options: paciencia-o-muerte. At last we were moving. Nearly an hour trapped in the dirty inhumane cage of the tube.

And whowas to blame for this? Later, when returning to the dreaded tube to go home all was revealed: signal failure. So no blame for anyone connected to London's useless state run public transport system. No blame, no responsibility. It was the siganls fault. Glad that was cleared up.

Stuck in the slow lane

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As if people were not already feeling the effects of the current economic downturn, the government seems hell-bent on draining every last penny from the pockets of individuals and firms. Under possible plans drawn up by ministers, local councils may soon have the power to charge employees up to £350 a year to park in areas provided by their employers.

The apparent logic (if we can call it that) behind this idea is that it will relieve congestion on our roads and help reduce pollution as the extra taxes will create a disincentive to drive to work. But this is hardly likely to work without significant improvements to public transport – something which, frankly, it would be very naïve to expect. And when you consider that fact that rail fares are going to rise by 11 percent in the South East next year, it looks like commuters are going to be attacked from both sides.

It seems ludicrous to me that a local council can be given the jurisdiction to impose parking charges in areas owned and provided by firms. This higher parking charge could simply force workers to park in the streets or in public spaces, creating further congestion our already overcrowded city centres. As people's disposable incomes are falling, this extra cost of working could prove to be a large blow, especially to those on lower incomes. The government claims to be helping those on lower incomes. Yet currently it is giving with one hand, while taking away with two.

Perhaps as we see rising unemployment we will see a fall in commuter congestion – and maybe then the government will finally be able to justify their poor economic performance!
 

Red in tooth and claw

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If and when Prince Charles does make it to the throne, he has decided to speak in public more than Her Majesty the Queen has so far. If his latest public utterance is anything to go by, he might do well to follow his mother’s example.

Published in The Times yesterday was a speech by the Prince that seems to have been inspired by the negative reactions to his previous dalliances with public oration. The title ‘The modern curse that divides us from Nature’ sums up the loquacious eulogy to all things natural as distinct from all things ‘modern’.

Note that nature gets a capital letter. This is fitting as the speech deifies the natural world. Drawing upon the thinking of Ghandi (that half naked Fakir), the Prince of Wales argues that modernism contravenes the harmony of nature.

The Prince is of course right to be concerned about the natural world, but to pitch nature against modernism is off the mark. Certainly, those in the aristocracy have long had a profound and fascinating relationship with the aesthetics of nature, shown in the wondrous estates built under their patronage. However, those who had to eek out a living from the land, had a very different relationship with nature. Your average peasant was not in harmony, but in constant peril and battle against the vagaries of nature.

His Highness rightly draws attention to the soulless life of those living in high-rise council housing, but this was caused by government social engineering, not the modern world. Some will criticize the Prince's opinions once more, for others his views will chime with theirs. Ironically, concurrence with the Prince’s view of nature is very modern. No longer is the love of nature the reserve of the landed elites. Despite recession, many in this country possess the economic freedom to protect themselves from the hardships of nature and concern themselves with its conservation.

Consensus is the refuge of scoundrels and collectivists

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This was the mind-boggling theme of Michael Crichton, the physician and polymath who died last week from cancer. In his books he delved into the horrendous problems caused by scientists who fall prey to the temptations of money, power and fame. In 66 years he wrote 26 novels, not famous for their style but nevertheless fairly readable, absorbing the attention of readers. Being a strong advocate of good science he was especially worried about the intrusion of politics into scientific enterprise – most of all in climate science. In this context it is worth reading his 2003 lecture at Caltech with the title "Aliens Cause Global Warming."

As the 20th century drew to a close, the connection between hard scientific fact and public policy became increasingly elastic. In part this was possible because of the complacency of the scientific profession; in part because of the lack of good science education among the public; in part because of the rise of specialized advocacy groups which have been enormously effective in getting publicity and shaping policy; and in great part because of the decline of the media as an independent assessor of fact.

Crichton drew on the same issues in his subsequent 2004 novel "State of Fear", which was dismissed by Al Gore among others. But contrary to the trivial science fiction confabbed by Gore, Crichton has serious scientific credentials stressing the point that consensus, which has become the main pillar of climate scare is the true antipode of good science. Historic consensus scams smothered scientific truths such as puerperal fever causing death on child delivery, pellagra being caused by poor diet, and Alfred Wegener's continental drift, for between fifty and 120 years. From this experience we can at least be confident that the global warming scam will not last forever.