I’ve been considering becoming a student again. “Retrain to gain”, they say, and I need to do something to justify a change in career path.
Here’s the course I’ve been considering : a Masters Degree in Science in Climate Change Management :-
Category: Big Picture
Big Picture : Science and Media often concentrate on one tiny element of a problem, ignoring the radioactive elephant in the room.
At the Climate Change campaign meeting on Saturday, “Six Months to Copenhagen”, hosted by the Fabian Society in London, Ed Miliband said some things I find astonishing admissions.
The Climate Change Committee, after having looked into the matter of Carbon Budgets on Carbon Emissions Reductions for the United Kingdom, made recommendations for our national targets :-
https://hmccc.s3.amazonaws.com/pdfs/LaunchPressRelease01.12.08.pdf
As usual at these events, I bumped into a couple of political activists of various flavours and persuasions at the Fabian Society conference “Six Months to Copenhagen”, today, held in the faded-yet-still-grand setting of the Foreign Press Association, just off The Mall in London.
[ The Mall is the street that links Trafalgar Square and Buckingham Palace. It’s not a shopping centre ].
The Circle Line can get a bit stifling in the evening. Not as much as the Central Line, which is often only a few tiers from the fires of Hell itself, but the Circle Line is often clammy in Summer, long after the Rush Hour home. Global Warming ? Global Steamy Clammy Heat !
So, I’m trying to maintain my personal cool and composure on the London Underground by not moving very much and reading a self-styled “pamphlet” I acquired at the 5th June 2009 conference “The politics of climate change : from economic crisis to business revolution”.
Bjørn Lomborg has been struggling to suppress action on Climate Change for some time now. He has reasoned that it is not such a big deal, and we would be better spending our resources and attention on other global ills.
Now, however, he’s proposing a universal Carbon Tax, in order to promote Renewable Energy – both Wind Power and Solar !
What’s gotten into the economist-man ? Has he been poisoned by teeth-whitening chemicals ? Has he finally seen the light ? Or does he think that anything is more workable than Cap-and-Trade ?
[ UPDATE : Some of you have mentioned that you thought this piece was rather biting. So I put it under Bryony’s nose and offered to change anything that she felt was inaccurate, personally distressing, or that she disagreed with or objected to on professional grounds. Changes are bolded. ]
At the The Guardian Climate Change Summit in London’s Russell Square’s Hotel Russell on Monday 15th June 2009, there was a large banner marked out with the name of the key sponsor of the event, E.On, but nobody at the large table underneath it to schmooze the attendees.
Perhaps they thought that the info pack in bright friendly red, orange and yellow colours would suffice in terms of communications. Perhaps they thought that they had enough of a hold on the event’s messaging by having their Chief Executive Officer Paul Golby speaking at one of the morning sessions.
You can take the soul out of an engineer with a boring, stressful or ethically suspect career, (like the Manhatten Project), but you can’t take the engineer out of a soul.
I have a persistent interest in things engineering, and some say I waste too much of my time thinking about systems engineering and the Laws of Physics.
I also have a persistent interest in the minds of engineers. How do we work ? What makes us tick ? And do we have an overview on social organisation that could be useful ?
David Kennedy, the chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change announced today, almost in passing, at the The Guardian Climate Change Summit, that the “Summer Strategy” regarding all the Government’s choices on Climate Change technologies, as articulated by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) will be published within the week.
I always thought it was a bit strange that the The Guardian’s Environment pages were confined to the Wednesday Society section of the “print edition” of this national newspaper.
Did that mean that the cranky, obsessive, possibly mentally unhinged eco-hippies should be shovelled in with the Social Workers, Educationalists, Housing Associations and Trades Unionists ?
Terry Leahy, the CEO of Tesco, the largest supermarket chain in Britain, spoke at the 5th June 2009 conference “The politics of climate change : from economic crisis to business revolution”. His mood was ebullient, it seemed to me.
“We’re going to miss all the targets we set ourselves.” I think he might have been referring to both the Kyoto Protocol and the UK / EU 2020 targets, so I don’t know why he seemed so buoyant about it.
At the conference “The politics of climate change : from economic crisis to business revolution” on 5th June 2009, Stelios Haji-Ioannou ended up flying by the seat of his pants.
“I’m usually [cast as] the Devil. People are trying to find a high-profile industry [to target]…[they choose] airlines.”
Anthony Giddens spoke at the conference called “The politics of climate change : from economic crisis to business revolution” on Friday 5th June 2009.
For someone who is normally so high-falutin’ in his academic contortions, he was remarkably pragmatic.
Categories
Peak Burn
Everyone who is grappling with the Twin Terrors of Climate Change and Peak Oil, sooner or later comes across a graph like this one (which I hand-drew for a Transition Towns meeting this evening) :-
Last week’s conference “The politics of climate change : from economic crisis to business revolution” was a great opportunity to bump into people I only normally read about.
Trouble is, although they irritate me at a distance by what they have said, or spent, or decided, or spun, when I meet them my anger has subsided and I just can’t get the venom together to be rude.
At the “The politics of climate change : from economic crisis to business revolution” conference on 5th June 2009, Peter Mandelson’s face was all puffed and pale. He looked rather like a middle-aged drag queen who’s had an allergic reaction to her démaquillant. Or it could be all those late night supposed emergency mini-conferences with Gordon Brown. Or Alan Sugar. You never know.
Well, Friends of the Earth are not to be found beating around any bushes or mincing any words today. It’s up front and confrontational on the matter of Carbon Offsetting coming out of the Clean Development Mechanism, and how it’s going to fail us. The new report is titled “A Dangerous Distraction : Why Offsetting is Failing the Climate and People : The Evidence” and its language is brutal :-
https://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefing_notes/dangerous_distraction.pdf
In the field of women’s clothing, fashions spectacularly come and shamefacedly go. As one of the presenters said towards the end of the Carbon Offsetting report launch this evening, she is fearful that perhaps offsetting could be just a trend, a fashion statement that will bow out after a short while, like legwarmers and chiapas :-
It is from the Business pages of The Times Online that I learn that Ed Miliband possibly cannot read, and does not seem to be able to think clearly.
https://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/utilities/article6401711.ece
[ Comments on “A Blueprint for a Safer Planet” by Nicholas Stern ]
So, I might be promoting sales of Nicholas Stern’s book with this post, but actually I think we should all read this book, just to be conscious of how Neoliberal Economics hasn’t evolved to encompass reality, even if it thinks it has.
There are many statements, assertions and hopes about the progress and possibilities of technology in Nicholas Stern’s book “A Blueprint for a Safer Planet : How to Manage Climate Change and Create a New Era of Progress and Prosperity”.
[ UPDATE – part of my argument about Coal got garbled. I have bolded changes.]
Over the Late Spring Bank Holiday Weekend, I had the unintentional opportunity to spend some recreational time with someone employed by the Government of the United Kingdom. I am not going to divulge details.
This person had clearly been to Brainwashing School and was on-message consistently, even in the relaxed and non-formal setting. They repeated, almost verbatim, rationales I have been hearing for several years.
[ UPDATE : For increased clarity, I have bolded a little update. ]
After I posted my report on Peak Oil :-
https://www.joabbess.com/2009/05/26/peak-oil-contraction-the-truth-is-out-there
I e-mailed Aubrey Meyer asking for his opinion. Within the hour my telephone start vibrating annoyingly, and it was Aubrey Meyer himself on the line, the architect of the Contraction and Convergence framework, with his usual, welcome, non-stop advice and guidance about where the policymakers are at, or not. I’d only anticipated an e-mail in reply, so it was a veritable honour to get a voice-to-voice. He’s normally too busy dispatching political stupidity to call little old me.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology have issued some seriously educational material about the risks of Global Warming, by contrasting the range of outcomes with and without Policy :-
From now on, all road trips will get leaner, cleaner and greener.
That’s the astonishing and very welcome news from Team Obama in the United States :-
https://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/19/obama-carbon-emissions-auto-industry
Categories
Oil Change
We didn’t look for this oil change in the world’s economic motor, but it’s happening all the same, and the future will definitely run less smoothly than the past, sorry to say.
UPDATE : I have been advised to be more precise about what Beulah actually is. The update is bolded for your convenience.
The Weyburn Oil Field field in Saskatchewan, Canada has been the centre of attention for several good reasons over the last few years.
Some of the grease-brained petroleum engineers had a brilliant idea one day : how about trying to pump extra oil out of the field by injecting waste gas into it ?