Big Picture : Science and Media often concentrate on one tiny element of a problem, ignoring the radioactive elephant in the room.
A curious little news item caught my eye last week : a Reuters report of the official opening of the Britain’s largest Carbon Capture project in Renfrew, Scotland :-
https://www.reuters.com/article/GCA-GreenBusiness/idUSTRE56R00E20090728
All pretty standard hot-off-the-Press-Release fare. You would have thought it was a fine thing, a noble undertaking, a breakthrough. If you were at all interested in Energy engineering, which most of you aren’t.
Reactions to the article “Wind Turbines Give You Spots” is encouraging, if contentious. Looks like we’ve mined a thick vein of dispute. Could a simple, happy, smiley Public Relations campaign to promote Wind Power counter this ? I think not !
I don’t know whether to laugh or shed tears in comic agony at this, which looks like the latest in a very long line of environmental “hoaxes”.
A person allegedly a paediatrician from New York claims to have diagnosed a new disorder, with a wide range of symptoms, relating to Wind Turbines.
Provisionally named “Wind Turbine Syndrome”, this “visceral vibratory vestibular disturbance” can be detected in folks unlucky enough to be living within the spinning shadow of new wind farms.
The Climate Camping season has begun in earnest today, 3rd August 2009.
Here’s a few of the links below. If you’r bored, curious or otherwise ungainfully unemployed, why not come and pitch your canvas alongside the radical Carbon-free thinkers and doers of the future ?
The Campaign against Climate Change has been running a very thought-provoking extending compendium of ideas on how to reduce British Carbon Emissions by ten percent by (the end of) 2010, to which you are all welcome to contribute :-
https://portal.campaigncc.org/content/10-10-ban-domestic-flights
https://portal.campaigncc.org/content/10-10-ban-domestic-flights-0
https://portal.campaigncc.org/content/10-10-50-reduction-cost-public-transport
A momentous report in from Dorset, which seems to be one of Britain’s most radioactive frontlines in the battle between Climate Change Denial and Renewables common sense.
Susan Chapman, Green Party candidate, a colleague from the small but highly informational Take Global Warming Seriously campaign, and an active member of Poole Agenda 21, writes about the tedious, unforgiving work of campaigning for a Carbon-free energy future.
Image Credit : Scott Kinmartin
Over the course of aeons of archeaological time, there has been a lot of death, I mean mass extinction, periods of natural hyper-slaughter and climate mayhem, atmospheric toxicity and ocean wipeout.
It’s all in the fossil record, except where those dead things have decomposed or chemically transposed into other things, like petroleum oil.
What’s the opposite of a negative “anti-” protest against Fossil Fuels ? Why, it’s a negative “anti-” protest against losing jobs in Renewable Energy, with the best positive intentions.
The assortment of folks occupying the Vestas manufactory in Newport on the Isle of Wight are struggling to make a positive contribution to the future of British green collar jobs.
Alas, their sustainable and forward-thinking plan has met with summary dismissal – sackings by letters slipped under their pizzas in a delivery drop – according to the Press. The ultimate in snide micro-management.
There has been a welter of contentious reporting about Wind Power in the English-speaking world. Honestly, you would have thought there was something wrong with investing in energy infrastructure that starts to pay back within three years, the amount of bad press the poor little aeolian turbines have been getting.
“What happens when the wind stops blowing ?”, people ask with a supercilious sneer, or a grumphy guffaw, as if they know every last thing about the way the wind works all of a sudden.
Little boy and girl engineers across the globe are starting a lifetime of fascination with wind turbines, playing with Trademarked miniature construction kits :-
https://hertenberger.co.za/?p=4831
https://legosip.blogspot.com/2009/04/120409-lego-7642-garage-7686-helicopter.html
Durable plastic toy manufacturers can see which way the wind is blowing, even if rich landowners, Mr-Deal-or-No-Deal [1] and certain members of the CPRE [2] cannot :-
I am often told that it is not the responsibility of the UK Government to decide which Energy Technologies are used.
That’s a bit limp. Some are better than others. Some are more efficient than others. Some plans for the deployment of technologies are better than others. Some use of technologies is wasteful by design.
If the Government leave all the decisions up to the private Energy suppliers and producers we will end up with the same mess we’ve always had : cheap, quick and dirty.
We all know we need Renewable Energy, by now, I think. It’s entering public consciousness. It’s no longer gun-toting woods-and-mountains survivalists and deep greens who are asking : “how will you ride the slide ?” :-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ulxe1ie-vEY
The Oil Drum, whose mission is “to facilitate civil, evidence-based discussions about energy and its impact on our future”, is running a short series about transition to Renewable Energy, written by Jeff Vail :-
https://www.theoildrum.com/node/5580
This is condensed from a series he published on his own webspace about the issues, calling it the “Renewables Hump” :-
https://www.jeffvail.net/2009/07/renewables-hump-8-concluding-thoughts.html
Out on the wild and windy moors, a battle for the wuthering heights of Middle England is coming to its apogee.
For what seems like aeons, certain branches of the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE), and their “enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my” friends in the misnamed Renewable Energy Foundation (REF), have been jousting with stirred-up local passions, fighting the feared onslaught of Wind Power.
There was a rash, a veritable rash of media articles last week about Ed Miliband’s Low Carbon Transition :-
https://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/publications/lc_trans_plan/lc_trans_plan.aspx
It was an overwhelming torrent of fairly helpful and semi-accurate information, and it’s taken me a few days to wade through it to fish out some relevant threads.
As received by e-mail :-
“The fight to save wind turbine production on the Isle of Wight continues!”
“600 jobs are threatened at the Uk’s only wind turbine blade factory on the Isle of Wight.”
“It is crucuially important that everyone bombard the energy minister Ed Miliband with phone calls and emails.”
Feeling faint and fatigued by Climate Change news recently, with its tit-for-tat spats about Policy and Science and most of all the Economics; grappling with the detractors and wreckers on various channels, I decided to turn to another source of information, trusting to uncover a little alternative inspiration.
I wanted to find something that would be unburdened by corporate advertising, untainted by agendas of those with financial or political capital to be made from various shifts in Energy and Carbon; something transparent and sufficiently broad to avoid niche arguments.
I hit upon a Science book for children, you know, with primary colour diagrams and simplified English, and it was quite refreshing. But wrong.
If you’re not doing very much else on 15th July 2009, why not take a look at the Shell Dialogue, asking the question : “can technology reduce Carbon Dioxide emissions ?”.
https://www.shelldialogues.com
https://www.shelldialogues.com/technologiesforco2
You can submit your questions in person to Jan van der Eijk, the Chief Technology Officer at Shell.
There are times in conversation when you know, you just know, that it’s going nowhere, and that you’ll have to fold. Cue lame excuses, mumbling into beard/beer/brassiere, lower eyes, get up and walk away. “It’s not you, it’s me”, you’ll claim, or something similarly limp, obvious and contrite.
So many times in the last six and a half years since I read the British Government’s Energy White Paper of February 2003, I’ve had to bow out of conversations with employees and fans of the Big Energy companies and the World Nuclear Association and some people from the Government as well.
This is possibly going to be Renewable Energy’s biggest week ever in UK history.
And we’re going to need all the Wind Power we can get to meet Ed Miliband’s lofty ambition.
Remember the American Space Program ?
Very large sums of public tax money have been ploughed into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration over the years, peaking in 1966 :-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget
OK, it gave us the Moon landings and Teflon (TM), but just recently, I don’t see much in terms of really, really new things.
What’s happened to the innovation ?
Despite the fact that there are only about five (and dropping) Climate Change “sceptics” in the British Parliament; and despite the fact that all major scientific and academic bodies, institutions and societies all declare their support for cuts in Global Warming pollution; the Media are still galumphing about in the murky mud of the 1980s in terms of public psychology.
It is essential that there is meaningful debate in the public realm about what Climate Change is doing to our world, and how we can control emissions and work to protect against damaging outcomes.
The evidence is all around us. And gradually, increasing numbers of people are adjusting their mental aerials to tune into the greater ideas and the bigger picture. What we don’t need just now are obfuscation and turbulence and gleeful mischievous wreckers.
The “Standard Fossil Fuel” Peak, that of Coal, Petroleum Oil and Natural Gas, is probably within 10 years.
We really have to avoid “Alternatives”, like Tar Sands, Oil Shale…or we could create Climate Crisis in another 10 years.
When BP branded themselves “Beyond Petroleum”, when Shell expanded its Renewables division briefly, we thought it was Greenwash, we thought it was about a bit of token Renewable Energy…but I think they might be serious – about “Alternative” Energy resources that would be way, way more Carbon-intensive than Coal.
It’s not something David Rutledge at CalTech has factored in, I think. He used to be talking about keeping Coal in the ground, but now he’s more optimistic that standard Fossil Fuels will not bring us to Climate catastrophe…
Heaven knows what Aubrey Meyer must feel like some days.
For every ounce of frustration I feel about the sloth-like pace of the international Climate negotiations, he must feel a pound of nerve-wrecking agitational sweating stress.
The United States of America has been trumpeting its progressive politics again this week, asserting itself as the world’s Climate Change leader at the G8 talks in L’Aquila in Italy.
[ UPDATE : Things look more interesting that when I first wrote this. Changes are bolded. ]
Looks like the Copenhagen treaty deal thingy is doomed :-
Nicholas Stern, and other more bog standard Economists, all seem to believe in the magical power of Innovation. He writes about it in a reverential way in his book “A Blueprint for a Safer Planet”.
Innovation : gleaming, sparkling, wondrous dexterity : if there’s a buck to be made from shaving a saving, or fishing for an efficiency, it is assumed the holy Market Economy will be in there, innovating away.
Or that’s what Economists believe anyway, wholeheartedly, generally, generously, neo-liberally.