Venezuela Campaign: An environmental disaster
Venezuela is one of earth’s 18 megadiverse countries, home to many rare and unique species. It’s little known, but in 2016 Nicolás Maduro began to threaten that by designating around 112,000 square kilometres of pristine tropical rain forest as a mining belt.
The ‘Orinoco Mining Arc’ is home to 198 indigenous communities, jaguars, giant anteaters, 850 bird species, and a great many more species. All are now threatened by mining activity.
This plan was originally conceived by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez. As Venezuela’s oil industry slowly collapsed from the pressures of corruption and mismanagement, the regime sought alternative sources of funding. Venezuela is extremely rich in natural resources like gold, nickel, iron ore, diamonds, alumina, and coal, so mining was an attractive option for the cash-strapped regime. The environmental damage of mining operations was completely disregarded, indeed no environmental impact assessment was ever done.
Venezuela’s National Assembly explicitly voted against the plan, making the activity unconstitutional and illegal. Although Maduro proposed that the mining would be done by state enterprises in partnership with foreign investors, the latter have understandably declined to participate. In reality, criminal gangs and Colombian guerrilla groups carry out the mining under the protection of the Venezuelan military.
Dutch journalist Bram Ebus was financed by the Pulitzer Centre to investigate. He concluded that the official government policy was meant to “put a legal jacket on illegal mining called Arco Minero... run by illegal armed troops and state forces.” The International Crisis Group has reported that top military officers in Amazonas state receive $800,000 each in bribes each month to facilitate the illegal mining. This explains both why military postings in the region are so popular and why some officers are keen to perpetuate the Maduro dictatorship.
The subsoil and rivers have been heavily polluted by the mercury used in the mills to extract gold from soil. The effects on the indigenous populations have been very severe. A 2017 survey found that indigenous people living along the Guaina, Inirida and Atabapo rivers had 60 times the maximum recommended level of mercury in their blood. 92 percent of the indigenous women surveyed in the Caura river basin had mercury levels above WHO limits and 37 percent of Ye’kuana and Sanema people had childbirth problems due to mercury. This has led to some children being born with missing limbs.
The impact of mercury runoff on aquatic life can be felt throughout the Orinoco basin. Latin American scientists have highlighted the “evidence of the bioaccumulation of these toxins in fish and shellfish sampled thousands of kilometres away from the nearest mine”, and warned of the “larger regional threat” to the South-eastern Caribbean in particular.
Because the Chavistas have destroyed all independent institutions and centralised all power, there are no environmental regulatory agencies in Venezuela to prevent or limit the destruction of the Orinoco basin. Nor are the proceeds from the mining being used for any socially useful purpose. According to Ebus, “It’s stolen, absolutely stolen. The Government is not interested in cash for the good of the country. It is a kleptocracy. They are going to be thieving what’s left until they’re not in power anymore.”
This environmental spoilage will continue as long as Maduro and his cronies remain in power. The international community has turned a blind eye to years of human rights abuses and totalitarianism, and it seems determined to also ignore environmental abuse. Greenpeace and the WWF’s UK websites have only one search result apiece for Venezuela, a staggering lack of coverage of the despoliation of one of the precious few megadiverse countries on earth. It will be a tragedy of enormous proportions if Maduro is allowed to continue the environmental destruction of this precious global resource.
More information on the Venezuela Campaign can be found on their website.
The miners' strike that ended an era
On March 3rd, 1985, the National Union of Mineworkers, led by Arthurs Scargill, voted to return to work after a year-long strike, the longest and most bitter strike, and one that finished without an agreement. The NUM members put on a brave face, many marching back behind colliery brass bands, but they and everyone else knew that Britain's strongest union, the NUM, had been beaten.
There were many reasons why the 1984-5 miners' strike failed where previous ones had succeeded. Margaret Thatcher has seen how the 1974 strike had brought down the Heath government by shutting down power stations through picketing and secondary support by other unions, and was determined not to let this happen again. When a strike was threatened over proposed pit closures in 1981, she had backed down because she wasn't ready, with only six weeks of coal stocks.
By 1984 she was ready. Her union reforms had introduced secret ballots for leadership elections and before strike action, and secondary picketing had been made illegal, with the threat that court action could seize union funds. She had built up six months of coal stocks, made arrangements to hire non-unionized lorry drivers to move coal to power stations, converted some coal-fired power stations to heavy fuel oil, and ramped up the nuclear contribution to the energy supply.
NUM leader, Arthur Scargill, a hardline Marxist, was itching for a showdown to humiliate and bring down the government, as in 1974. The union had balloted its members for strike action in 1982 and 1983, but had failed to win a majority, let alone the 55% the rules required. In 1984, to avoid another ballot defeat, the NUM executive voted 69-54 not to hold a ballot, but to have some areas strike and picket others to stop them mining. The result was that some efficient and profitable pits, led by the Nottinghamshire ones, decided to keep working. Violent confrontations occurred as pickets tried to stop them, and mobile police units were established to bring in police from outside to thwart the flying pickets.
Nottinghamshire and South Leicestershire miners still working set up a new union, the Democratic Union of Mineworkers, and as the year wore on, increasing numbers of strikers began to drift back to work. Scargill drew fire for accepting a £1.5 million donation from the Soviet Union, and for opposing the Polish Union, Solidarity, as an "anti-socialist organization which desires the overthrow of a socialist state". The result was that Polish coal continued to be exported to Britain throughout the strike.
The defeat of the strike, on this day in 1985, ended the era of militant union domination in the UK. The political power of the NUM and other unions was much diminished, and union membership fell. It plunged from roughly 40% of Britain's workforce to barely 20%, and today barely 14% of private sector workers are union members.
That historic defeat help turn round Britain's economy. In 1984 the UK lost 27 million days of work to industrial action, the highest in Europe. By 2017 this had fallen to 276,000, about 1% of the number, putting the UK among the lowest. It severely damaged the unions' prestige and morale, as well as their influence. On the cultural front, it did inspire some movies, including "Billy Elliot" in 2000, "Brassed Off" in 1996, and "Pride" in 2014, based on the real-life LGBT group that raised money for the strikers. Funniest was "Strike" in 1998, which used the strike as backdrop to a savage satire on Hollywood.
Toilet paper and Milton Friedman's four ways of spending money
As we all recall Milton Friedman said there are four ways of spending money:
“There are four ways in which you can spend money. You can spend your own money on yourself. When you do that, why then you really watch out what you’re doing, and you try to get the most for your money. Then you can spend your own money on somebody else. For example, I buy a birthday present for someone. Well, then I’m not so careful about the content of the present, but I’m very careful about the cost. Then, I can spend somebody else’s money on myself. And if I spend somebody else’s money on myself, then I’m sure going to have a good lunch! Finally, I can spend somebody else’s money on somebody else. And if I spend somebody else’s money on somebody else, I’m not concerned about how much it is, and I’m not concerned about what I get. And that’s government. And that’s close to 40% of our national income.”
Neatly illustrated here in this little tale of toilet paper:
We’re all becoming more aware about the damage single-use plastics and fast fashion has on the environment. Yet there is one product we all throw away every single day that, so far, has not been a major part of conversations about sustainability: toilet paper.
But America’s heavy use of toilet paper – particularly the pillowy soft kind – is worsening climate change and taking “a dramatic and irreversible toll” on forests, especially the Canadian boreal forest, according to a new report by two major environmental groups, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) and Stand.earth.
We appear to have a fundamental conflict here between those who would wipe and those who prefer Canada to have forests. Not that there is such a conflict, Canada’s large enough, with enough forests, that they regenerate faster than they’re cut down but still, that’s what we’re told. Leading to:
Major toilet paper brands have refused to use more sustainable materials, the report says, because Americans tend to more concerned than the rest of the world about ideal toilet paper texture in their homes, largely due to decades of marketing around toilet paper softness.
In Churchill’s letters there’s a part where he luxuriates in the soft stuff available on an American battleship compared to that of wartime Britain - this isn’t a new issue.
The authors offer a scorecard system to rate the brands that have the biggest environmental impact. It’s mostly the big brands of quilted paper that score badly, with Charmin Ultra Soft, Kirkland Signature and Angel Soft all receiving F grades because they contain little or no recycled material. Brands that use recycled paper, such as Seventh Generation and Natural Value, received an A grade.
Notably they say that “recycled materials are more commonly used in away-from-home tissue brands, like those found at offices or airports, where marketing for softness is less crucial”. So next time you’re greeted at the departure gate by toilet paper with a texture similar to a handful of gravel, you can take solace in the fact you’re saving the forests.
Or, as we might put it, those stocking the public toilets are spending other peoples’ money on other people, leading to not much concern about what is got…..
When Concorde first took flight
On March 2nd, the Anglo-French supersonic Concorde took to the air for the first time. Its maiden flight lasted 27 minutes, never exceeding 300 mph. The plane was later to fly at Mach 2.2, or 1,354 mph at an altitude of over 60,000 feet, nearly twice the height of conventional passenger jets. It could carry 92 – 128 passengers.
Backed by the British and French government, the costs were estimated at £70m. With delays and cost overruns not uncommon in government-backed projects, they eventually came to £1.3bn. The plane was a technological marvel, but an economic disaster because so few were sold. British Airways and Air France each operated seven aircraft, and there were six prototype and development aircraft built, making 20 in all. British Airways and Air France both ran it profitably only when development costs were written off.
It is rather typical of big government projects. Legislators and civil servants are not as cautious with taxpayers’ money as investors tend to be with their own. If government undertakes a big commercial project, it is a good bet that real commercial interests will not touch it. A popular phrase in the 60s and 70s was ”picking winners,” in which government was supposed to back projects that would pay off. Alas, “picking losers” would have described the policy more accurately. From DeLorean cars to the Meriden Motorcycles Cooperative, government always seemed to end up writing off the loans or investments it had made.
It is conceivable that Concorde might have worked if the development costs had been spread through several later derivatives, as Boeing did with its jetliners. A stretched version that carried more passengers, and other spin-offs that used the now-developed technology might have succeeded. But it was not to be. A fatal crash at Paris was reckoned to have been the beginning of the end for Concorde, and in 2003 it was retired.
It was undoubtedly a technological marvel. I flew it five times, and never tired of the thrill when the Mach-meter on the front bulkhead clicked up 2.0 in big red numbers. Otherwise there was no sensation of speed, even though it flew faster than a rifle bullet. I did take photos of a black sky and curved Earth seen though its small windows.
Several private firms are working on supersonic passenger or business jets, with the first prototypes due to fly later this year or early next. New technology on the airframe shape is expected to reduce or eliminate the supersonic boom that limited Concorde to breaking the sound barrier only over oceans. It did establish, at vast expense to British and French taxpayers, that there is a demand for faster air transport at premium prices, and no doubt more level headed private firms will develop aircraft that can tap into that demand and make the money from it that government failed to do.
The privatisation of probation - or a change in probation
A report out that recent changes to the probation service didn’t work. Or were costly, Or that privatisation was to blame. That last not being quite what was found although it will undoubtedly be what is said about it.
The thing being how the probation service worked was changed at the same time as who did the probation was. It therefore being more than a little difficult to blame anything on just the who.
Problems with the partial privatisation of the probation system in England and Wales have cost taxpayers almost £500m, the government spending watchdog says.
That’s what will be the political football, obviously enough. Privatisation, costs. Reality being just that tad bit more complex:
Prior to the reforms, which were designed to drive down re-offending rates, convicts who had served less than one year did not have to be supervised by probation services.
But from 2015 every criminal given a custodial sentence became subject to statutory supervision and rehabilitation upon release into the community.
The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) said this meant an extra 40,000 offenders were being supported each year.
The NAO report said that between January 2015 and September 2018, the number of offenders recalled to prison for breaching their licence condition increased by almost half, from 4,240 to 6,240.
Over the same period, the percentage of offenders recalled to custody who had received sentences of less than 12 months increased from 3% to 36%.
Checking more people led to more people being found in violation of their terms. Given that we’d rather like people not to be in violation of those terms this might be regarded as an increase in the efficiency or effectiveness of the service. And yes, obviously enough, a rise in the cost of the system. Banging up the criminals does indeed have a cost.
What we want to know about the privatisation or not is whether a not-privatised service would have cost more or less under the same terms and conditions. The one thing we don’t know - and the one thing that just about no one is going to discuss here either. But, you know, politics, just blame the privatisation.
The machine that emancipated women
On March 1st, 1873, E Remington and Sons of Ilion, New York, began production of the first practical typewriter. Before then messages were hand-written, and difficult to read if the writer had poor handwriting. The typewriter enabled words to be written faster and more legibly, and with standardized letters that looked exactly the same each time.
Its immediate commercial impact was that it speeded up business communication and made it less prone to error. Remington created the QWERTY keyboard, and went from selling 1,400 typewriters in 1882 to 14,000 in 1887. The QWERTY distribution was chosen because some people typed so fast that the mechanical rods attached to the keys stuck together. Under the new pattern, the most used letters were spaced out so the rods didn’t jam together. Remington’s success led to other manufacturers adopting the same layout.
In an article in The North American Review, 1888, "The Typewriter; Its Growth and Uses," P G Hubert wrote: “With the aid of this little machine an operator can accomplish more correspondence in a day than half a dozen clerks can with the pen, and do better work,”
The typewriter had a sociological impact as well as an economic one. Hubert also pointed out that the typewriter provided employment opportunities for women. Prior to that time, the most common jobs for women were in domestic service, with teaching being the main outside professional job for those better educated. He observed that typing jobs paid as much or more as teaching did.
The spread of secretarial jobs and the rise of the typing pool gave women new economic power. It changed attitudes, as women were now able to join the productive economy. Women had more opportunities for independence, and restaurants emerged to meet the lunchtime needs of female workers.
Opinions were at first divided, with some religious leaders deploring the fact that mixing the sexes in workplaces gave rise to opportunities for sin. On the other hand, others tied the growing economic power of women, made possible by the typewriter, to a more assertive determination to become full citizens by acquiring the right to vote.
Having ruled for nearly a century, the day of the typewriter drew to a close, its remains preserved in the keyboards of our computers like flies preserved in amber. Even those keyboards might soon fade away as voice recognition technology supersedes them.
Just a little story about technological advance and living standards
One of the advantages of ageing into maturity is that one can recall what it was like. Until one has aged through into senescence of course. About which. At about the arrival of the majority of one of us mobile phones were really a pretty new thing. Airtime was £1 a minute, about what the hourly wage was at the low end. The capital cost of one of the new phones - which had to be bolted into a vehicle to be useful - was about that of a reasonable second hand car.
A journalist wanted to call the UK head of IBM. Did so, called that mobile car number, and was told !”I’m sorry, he’s on the other line”. This was sufficient evidence of truly conspicuous consumption that it was written up in the computer press.
This morning a quick email exchange ended by a “Well, I’m just about to get on a plane”. Followed minutes later by the revelation that said plane, from NZ to the UK, had WiFi and thus email free to passengers.
Yes, obviously, the value of all of this depending upon what people have to say to each other.
And yet there are those who insist that living standards haven’t budged in these past few decades. That real wages just haven’t risen. That’s not an assertion that’s really viable, is it?
Nylon and the double helix
Both nylon and DNA play major roles in today’s economy, and both were discovered on February 28th of different years. Wallace Carothers, working for DuPont, invented nylon in 1935, while Francis Crick and James Watson on this day in 1953, excitedly told friends about the double helical structure of DNA.
The significance of nylon is that it is a fully synthetic fabric, made entirely from chemicals. There had long been semi-synthetic fabrics made from animal or vegetable products, starting with linen, made from flax and dating back thousands of years. Rayon, another semi-synthetic made from wood, was first produced in 1905. Nylon, made from petroleum products, was the first commercially successful fully synthetic fabric. Women’s stockings made from nylon were shown at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, and the product came along just in time to replace imports during World War II. It was used for parachutes and ropes throughout the war.
Carothers was not primarily motivated by money, though his move from Harvard to DuPont nearly doubled his salary. He had an enquiring, problem-solving mind, and liked to take on difficult challenges and succeed where others had fallen short. Nylon was his greatest achievement, although he was also a key figure in the development of neoprene synthetic rubber. Unfortunately, he never lived to see the full success of nylon. He was a depressive, and committed suicide in 1937, not knowing the degree to which his achievements had left their mark on the world.
Francis Crick and James Watson worked at Cambridge using X-ray crystallography data from Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin. Watson’s book, “The Double Helix,” is regarded as a classic of popular science, telling the story of their discovery in a gripping first-person account. It was a race to be the first to decode the structure of DNA, with Linus Pauling as their main rival. Both worked feverishly, desperately afraid that someone would beat them to it. When they finally realized it was a double helix, they dashed to the Eagle pub in Cambridge and drew the double helix in beer on the table to explain it to their friends. It’s a pub I sometimes visit, and it has a plaque marking the discovery.
They were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1962, jointly with Wilkins. Franklin had died tragically young aged 37, four years earlier, and could not share the prize because it is not awarded posthumously. Although the Nobel Prize came with a substantial sum, this was not what motivated them. They did it for the excitement and achievement of discovery, like Carothers, and had the additional motivation of glory. They wanted to be acclaimed by their peers, and knew that success would likely bring the coveted prize.
In both cases the discoverers made the breakthrough, but entrepreneurs turned it into commercial success. DuPont made handsome returns by promoting both nylon and neoprene with aggressive market strategies. And many businesses have profited by applying the discovery of DNA to practical and medicinal uses. I had significant portions of my genome mapped by 23andMe shortly after the company was founded in 2006. Now I am in the process of having my full DNA sequenced by a commercial firm that does so.
It is important to understand that it takes not only discoverers moved by the thrill of solving the problem; it also takes entrepreneurs to turn that discovery into something that people will willingly pay for. Nylon and DNA are but two examples of something that happens all the time.
We agree with Vince Cable's facts, it's the interpretation which.....
We have a certain little disagreement with Sir Vince Cable here. We’re not arguing the facts in evidence, rather the implication of them.
Given that we’ve rather expensive housing in the UK the idea that we should subsidise people to buy housing does seem a little odd. As we’ve been saying - shouting - these years it would be better to increase supply, that thing which is known to reduce prices at any given level of demand. That’s not what the government decided to do, as we know, and as we argued against. The reason why we argued against being what would happen:
Housebuilder Persimmon made a record-breaking £1bn profit last year – equal to more than £66,000 on every one of the homes it sold – with almost half of its house sales made through the taxpayer-funded help-to-buy scheme.
Well, yes, stoking - subsidising - demand is going to cause that sort of thing:
Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat leader, accused Persimmon of “pinching their profits from the public purse”, adding: “Far from benefiting first time buyers, the major effect of help-to-buy is to drive up demand while having no effect on supply. The result is not help for those who need it, but a boost to the profits of big developers.”
The blame attaches though not to Persimmon. Economic actors can only react to the incentives government puts before them. The blame attaches to the damn fool way the government decided to spend our money. Something we would prefer Sir Vince to have emphasised despite his general insistence that more of our money being spent is the solution to everything.
If we desire more houses, or lower prices for them, then we want to increase supply, not subsidise demand. Be worth pointing that out, no?
NHS CEO gets yet another boss
One has to feel sorry for Simon Stevens, the long-suffering CEO of NHS England. Every chief executive has a Chairman but few have ever lambasted their own organisations to the extent that Lord David Prior last week criticised the NHS and, by inference, current and previous Secretaries of State: “Do you know any other big organisation in the world that hives off its digital strategy into a separate organisation, that hives off its people and HR strategy into a different organisation, and splits its purchasing function from its sales function? Because that’s where the NHS has been. You could not have designed something that has inherently, at its heart, more dysfunctionality.”
A major part of the problem is the sheer number of quangos and committees telling Stevens how he should do his job. The Taxpayers Alliance suggested last year that the 19 health quangos could be reduced at a stroke to seven, saving three quarters of a billion pounds and releasing top managerial time to improve NHS England.
Instead of that, Health Secretary Hancock today announced yet another meddling quango: “NHSX: A new joint organisation for digital, data and technology”. The press release says “The CEO of NHSX will have strategic responsibility for setting the national direction on technology across organisations. The CEO will be accountable to the Health Secretary and chief executives of NHS England and NHS Improvement.” Odd that. If digital technology is to be the saviour of the NHS as the Health Secretary believes and NHSX will be in direct charge of it, surely NHS England will be accountable to NHSX, not the other way around. We already have a similar problem with NHS Improvement, i.e. which is in charge of change and therefore who reports to whom? This compounds it. In Lord Prior’s language, do you know of any big organisation in the world that hives off development to outside agencies?
But it gets worse because NHS Digital already has all the responsibilities now being ascribed to NHSX and NHS Digital employs 6,000 people to do them. It also has the ambiguity of being part of the NHS and independent from it. It is also supposed to have the same relationship with social care except it does not bother to do that at all.
Today’s press release quotes Sarah Wilkinson, chief executive of NHS Digital, as saying: “This new joint venture between the organisations who currently define digital strategy and commission digital services will create cohesion in these activities by concentrating work and capabilities in one unit.” So all this digital leadership will become a single entity? Dear me no. She goes on to say: “Within NHS Digital we view NHSX as an important and welcome initiative and we are absolutely committed to working closely with colleagues in NHSX to make this new venture a success.”
Quite frankly, this is Yes-Minister-speak for “These two organisations will fight like cat and dog.” Creating a fight without purpose in the biggest public sector department, what a fantastic use of taxpayer funds.
Lord Prior is right: NHS England’s CEO needs fewer bosses but more responsibility.