We’ve all sat in our seats on an aircraft before take off with the seat next to us empty. First we start hoping that no one sits there, then we hope that if someone must fill the space it’s not an excessive talker, or a noisy child, then our hope is vanquished. Down the aisle comes a 300lb lumbering hippo that is going to attempt to squeeze itself into the empty seat and in the process marry itself to you as well. Into the seat they go and then the fountain of fat bursts forth and they spread themselves over you, enveloping your space and ensuring the next hours of your life are going to be excruciatingly uncomfortable. Why should we pay for this?
Airlines though are listening to the bulk of their customers, rather than their bulkier customers. United Airlines announced that it was seeking to charge obese passengers the cost of a second seat and Ryanair have revealed that over 30,000 voted in favour of charging overweight people a ‘fat tax’ when they fly. Those of the larger persuasion have to realise that space on an aircraft is at a premium and that paying for one seat when they comfortably fill two is sufficient for airlines to lose money whilst also causing discomfort to those next to them.
As the numbers of obese people steadily climbs airlines can no longer afford to treat them as single persons, while fair in principle the costs that they incur far outweighs the price they pay. Perhaps these extra costs will be a wake up call and change their eating behaviour. Or perhaps these costs will spark an entrepreneur into starting up Heavyweight Airlines or some similar named organization. The overweight though have to realise that, “obesity is always and everywhere an overeating phenomenon” and that they are no longer in the same weight class as the rest of us meagre morsels. (Apologies to Mr Friedman)
After witnessing the hoards of climate change activists protesting at the G20 meeting recently, it became clear there is a public consensus that a large powerful state (and vast government spending and taxation) is the only tool for combating environmental damage.
This scheme being started in Sweden, albeit on a meso-scale, is evidence that market solutions to climate change exist where profit incentives benefit all concerned. These farmers are tapping the methane produced by their fertilizer before it is spread onto the fields. Reports suggest that from the eighteen farmers (who’s farms produce 130,000 tonnes of fertilizer) participating, the equivalent of 2.1million litres of petrol could be produced. Enough to power 30 trucks, 30 busses and 250 cars per year.
The essence of these market based solutions to climate change is that the farmers are driven by profit incentives rather than a government induced social conscience. As one farmer said:
Well I hope that I will be able to make loads of money. I hope that I will become a proper oil sheikh.
One of the greatest assets of this scheme is that it benefits both society and the farmers with relatively little costs to either – The fertilizer is a natural by-product of pastoral agriculture, and if the methane was not utilised in this way, would only escape into the atmosphere anyway. These types of schemes are highly sustainable as they do not rely upon government funding and are not plagued by top-down government interference, while the profit incentive will make them much more efficient than government projects designed to be high-profile vote-chasers.
Put simply, environmental goals cannot be achieved by simply throwing large sums of public money around.
At least, according to the US Environmental Protection Agency. Of course, there is still some way to go before this "pollutant" is controlled under the Clean Air Act, and it is conceivable that Congress will pass legislation aimed at controlling emissions in the meantime (but I wouldn't put money on it).
Carbon dioxide is essential for life. Without it, plants could not photosynthesise and, without plants, there would be no animal life, or anyone to write or read this blog. Horticulturalists deliberately boost the level in the air in greenhouses to increase their crop yields. Humans and all other animals add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere every time they exhale. But, because the IPCC has deemed it to be the major driver of recent changes to the climate (despite there being no direct evidence to support this view), the EPA has now ruled that it can harm humans and therefore can be controlled under the CAA.
If this is taken to its logical conclusion, and carbon dioxide is treated in the same way as truly harmful gases such as sulphur dioxide, the impact on the US economy is likely to be severe, and both the American public and the Obama administration will have cause to regret it.
Happily, someone is indeed getting serious about climate change: the pity is though that it's not our Government, despite their plans to spend some £100 billion on putting a windmill on top of every bump in the landscape. It's actually two private companies:
The initial plan is for the firm Solaren Corp to provide some 200MW of electricity. Solaren, which is based in Manhattan Beach, California, says it will launch a satellite with an array of solar panels around 22,000 miles above the earth's equator using existing rocket technology, and then convert the power generated into radio-frequency transmissions. The radio waves would be beamed back down to antennae in Fresno, California and then converted into electricity and fed into the regular power grid, PG&E said.
All that PG&E has agreed to do is to buy the electricity if they can indeed manage to produce and deliver it.
There are no technical reasons why it cannot work, only cost ones. In fact, it's a cost one. The price of getting to orbit. Bring that cost down and such space based solar power systems would be financially as well as technically feasible.
Perhaps we should be agitating for the following modest proposal? The Government is already saying that there will be pots and oodles of money spent on various renewable energy generation projects. Why not simply agree that a pot or an oodle be made available to anyone who can deliver such space based solar power to the UK?
Think of it along the lines of the Ansari X-Prize. No money up front, no advance subsidy or "investment" from the State. Just an agreement that any power delivered from such a source will indeed be purchased under the same highly favourable terms as power derived from other renewable technologies. That would spark something of a technological race wouldn't it?
Think on it: it's already agreed that our taxes will be used to subsidise windmills, dams and the like. Why not use that, at no nett extra cost, to try and solve climate change once and for all by encouraging the exploitation of a near inexhaustible (I'm not sure that anyone's quite thinking ahead 4 billion years to hte dimming of the Sun as yet) source of energy?
The German’s have become the sixth member of the EU to introduce a ban on Genetically Modified maize crops. This may please the environmental lobby groups who can afford to influence the government, but is it really the best decision for Europe in the current climate?
Food prices have risen so rapidly recently that the annual expenditure of a family has grown by hundreds of Euros, having a dramatic impact on the quality of living for those on lower incomes. GM crops would have pushed food prices down and made life for many families more comfortable during the tough times.
One of the previous reasons that food prices were artificially high was due to pressure from environmental groups to convert vast amounts of crops into biofuel – much of which has now fortunately been reversed. The environmental lobby may wish to make a more sustainable use of natural resources but they neglect the main resource society has to offer. The people.
Our main priority should be ensuring that food prices are low enough to allow families to live comfortably within their means, and GM crops are the best way to achieve this. In turn, these families may then have enough disposable income to ensure their decisions are environmentally beneficial. For example, they could afford to insulate their homes or convert to a low emissions car.
The CBI is publicly calling for the government to invest more in greening the economy. This was prompted by the low percentage of spending on green issues in the UK's stimulus package. A contributory factor was no doubt the recent withdrawal of several major energy companies from investment in a range of renewable energy schemes, particularly wind farms.
Private sector companies are, by and large, good at spotting opportunities for profit and exploiting them. The message from Shell and others is that the market is not rigged sufficiently well in favour of otherwise uneconomic projects to make it attractive for them to participate. The message from the CBI, on the other hand, is that the government should pass more taxpayers' money the way of businesses to encourage them to invest in economically dubious activities. This doesn't sound like the best way of generating either jobs or prosperity (or, for that matter, power).
Transport for London doesn’t offer the best of service. I’m sure most people who live or work in the capital have lost count of the number of times they have been have been late for an engagement or told their service is not running. This is mainly because the complex task of keeping the city moving is controlled by politcians who indulge in grand, top-down schemes. This creates a culture of misdirection and mismanagement.
The scheme recently launched by TfL to provide 6,000 new ‘hire bikes’ to the capital looked optimistic at first. A fairly simple, yet effective way to relieve congestion on the roads, free-up public transport and cut carbon emissions. Only the public sector could find a way to turn this straight-forward idea into a farce. And they have - spectacularly.
They have now announced that none of the bikes will not be given padlocks and anybody supplying their own padlock will be fined £150. A deposit will be paid before a bike can be hired, and will naturally be unredeemable if the bike is stolen. So effectively TfL is denying the cyclists the right to protect their money. If people cannot lock their hired bikes, they are simply not going to use the scheme.
With most people's attention understandably on the economic situation and the G20 summit, let's not forget what environmentalists are doing. Among the various protest groups having their say in London this week, there is a general understanding that the future world they want to live in will be green and fair as well as being devoid of greedy capitalists. We have also had the "people's premiere" of "The Age of Stupid", a film brought to you by the makers of McLibel.
Whereas Al Gore's invaluable contributions to the debate have at least dealt with factual evidence (cherry-picked to tell a particular story, but still largely factual), the new film is a dramatic look back from a post-Apocalypse future at what went wrong. Not surprisingly, there are clear-cut heroes and villains, with the overall message that it's all been our fault. This message has been reinforced over the last week by Rowan Williams' lecture on responsibility in York Minster. In this, he summed up the belief of many (whether Christian or not) that the environment has been changed "appallingly for the worse". This, I suggest, goes against the experience of most people lucky enough to live in the industrialised world.
Rather than living currently in the Age of Stupid, when mankind wantonly destroys the planet, it seems more likely that we are actually in the Age of Gullible, when the majority of opinion formers, the media and intellectuals are willing to place unquestioning belief in the dire predictions of environmentalists.
A portend of the future will be visited upon the population of the earth this coming Saturday evening at 8.30pm: a planet with a seemingly limited electricity supply. WWF’s Earth Hour is hoping that over 1 billion people across the globe wilfully choose to sit in the dark for an hour and celebrate reducing their carbon emissions, briefly. This return to the Dark Ages signifies that there are many out there who hate life and mans achievements and wish to return to more simpler times.
After sitting around in the dark for an hour most people will then be reaching for the light switch creating a surge that the electrical grids will have to deal with. As an example the biggest in the UK was after the England West Germany World Cup Semi Final, a surge that measured 2800MW, meaning that come 9.30pm this evening supplies will most probably have to be bought in from elsewhere. But at least the message is put across to politicians, that there are many people out there who are willing to have their electrical supply rationed, something that they are willing upon themselves so that they can alleviate their own guilt and clamber atop the moral mountain.
But people please don’t switch off. Switch on, tune in and embrace and celebrate all of mankind’s achievements that have brought us to where we are via our unique adaptability to change. Such as clean coal and nuclear power true signs of the ingenuity of man. The ultimate goal has to be how to harness energy from fusion power, something we should be striving for rather than wasting our time sitting around in the dark.
Ben O'Neill has written a superb piece on the excellent Von Mises website about the Victorian Bushfires. Here is a brief synopsis of his arguments. Click here to read the full paper.
Australia last month experienced its most devastating bushfires in history. Fires raged in the state of Victoria on an unprecedented scale, killing over 200 people and destroying 1,834 homes. By comparison the 1983 “Ash Wednesday" bushfire killed 75 people and back in 1939 on “Black Friday" 71 people died. In fact, in all previous such fires - since reporting of bushfires started in the 17th century - a total of 642 have perished.
The immediate possible causes of the fires include arson, discarded cigarette butts, faulty power lines and lightning strikes. However, these minor events escalated into infernos only because of extremely high fuel loads throughout the state's bushland. The reason?
For years, local governments have neglected to manage fire hazards on their land in order to be faithful to the principles of environmentalism — a philosophy that contends that nature has intrinsic value that must be preserved, regardless of any use it has to man. The result has been that people have sacrificed their prosperity and even survival in an attempt to preserve the unspoiled sanctity of nature.
We’ve all sat in our seats on an aircraft before take off with the seat next to us empty. First we start hoping that no one sits there, then we hope that if someone must fill the space it’s not an excessive talker, or a noisy child, then our hope is vanquished. Down the aisle comes a 300lb lumbering hippo that is going to attempt to squeeze itself into the empty seat and in the process marry itself to you as well. Into the seat they go and then the fountain of fat bursts forth and they spread themselves over you, enveloping your space and ensuring the next hours of your life are going to be excruciatingly uncomfortable. Why should we pay for this?
After witnessing the hoards of climate change activists protesting at the G20 meeting recently, it became clear there is a public consensus that a large powerful state (and vast government spending and taxation) is the only tool for combating environmental damage.
The German’s have become the sixth member of the EU to introduce a 
The CBI is publicly 
Transport for London doesn’t offer the best of service. I’m sure most people who live or work in the capital have lost count of the number of times they have been have been late for an engagement or told their service is not running. This is mainly because the complex task of keeping the city moving is controlled by politcians who indulge in grand, top-down schemes. This creates a culture of misdirection and mismanagement.
With most people's attention understandably on the economic situation and the G20 summit, let's not forget what environmentalists are doing. Among the various protest groups having their say in London this week, there is a general understanding that the future world they want to live in will be green and fair as well as being devoid of greedy capitalists. We have also had the "people's premiere" of "The Age of Stupid", a film brought to you by the makers of McLibel.
A portend of the future will be visited upon the population of the earth this coming Saturday evening at 8.30pm: a planet with a seemingly limited electricity supply. WWF’s 
Ben O'Neill has written a superb piece on the excellent Von Mises website about the Victorian Bushfires. Here is a brief synopsis of his arguments. Click