Burning Money : Wasting chances. Spending real value on expended ideas. Diversionary activities.
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.
Scottish historians can correct me on this : was it Robert the Bruce or William Wallace who first coined the phrase “if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again” ?
Well, it seem the “life sciences” industry, producing genetically modified organisms, is doing just that, this time in the fields of Energy and Climate Change.
I was at a conference not long ago where during one of the breakout sessions I found myself sitting next to an “ad chick”, you know, a woman in advertising.
We passed the time of day, and I found I needed to challenge her on her naive belief that cars will progressively continue to get less Carbon hungry. “Within 20 years,” I soothsayed, “each adult will only have a Carbon ration for a fifth of a car”. Her face had an expression on it that was akin to painful disgust : like I was denying her her human rights, or something.
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.
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 ?
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 ].
[ 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 have been reading Nicholas Stern’s book “A Blueprint for a Safer Planet : How to Manage Climate Change and Create a New Era of Progress and Prosperity”, and I feel that it is somehow my role to be making some rather critical remarks about it.
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 London School of Economics last Friday 5th June 2009, there was a conference called “The politics of climate change : from economic crisis to business revolution”.
In the afternoon, after Adair Turner spoke, we were treated to the pragmatic realism of Andy Duff, the CEO of RWE npower, the Energy group.
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
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
[ 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 : 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 ?
The British political system is currently reeling from a scandal so far-reaching and so widely-spread that it seems hard to know what shape it will take in the future.
Government Ministers and their opposite numbers in the other Parties are being thrown from their ranks, and even their “safe seats”, back home in their Constituencies.
Everywhere I’ve gone for the last couple of weeks, I’ve taken Nick Stern with me. Or rather, his bright blue book with the “World Class” title “A Blueprint for a Safer Planet”.
To answer Climate Change we must have strategies for new Low Carbon Energy investment.
The technologies we need to deploy are those that are already proven, and can be installed in the fastest possible time. What we can DO, and DO NOW.
This is DO-Tech, NOW-Tech : and it effectively rules out new rounds of Nuclear Energy, which is slow-to-grid. It also rules out the almost entirely hypothetical Carbon Capture and Storage.
I’m feeling a little “Carbon-resigned” tonight.
Nobody in the British Government has a handle on national Carbon Dioxide Emissions, and the announcement of up to four Carbon Capture and Storage “demonstration” projects doesn’t inspire me with confidence.
[ UPDATED : Someone kindly pointed out a typographical error. The correct expression is “Business as Usual”. My excuse : late night dyslexia. Thanks, o diligent reader. Keep up the good work. ]
The Old Lecture Theatre in the Old Building at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) tonight was filled with noise, as people, packed to the rafters, exchanged hot air like it was the End of the World.
And so it was, or will be. The End of the World, I mean, unless we sort out Climate Change. Nick Stern made that quite clear.
I can imagine the shared advertising now : a cartoon of a large tanker, shaped like a floating Coke bottle, with the caption “We funnel your fizz”.
The Thane of Fife had a little meeting this week that reminded me somewhat of “The Scottish Play” in its treachery, and faith in the Nuclear Power Ghost to absolve Carbon stains, rather than the harsh inevitability of true Energy Conservation grit.
Glowing Gordon Brown and E.On-atomic-bright Ed Miliband travelled to the seat of the Scottish Government from the seat of the English Government, seemingly to push the Nuclear button.