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Audete, Gaudete ! Christus est natus Ex Maria Virgine, Gaudete ! Tempus adest gratiae, Deus homo factus est, |
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Welcome, little Christmas rose, into a big and troubled world. We are so happy you’ve made your journey safely, we could sing heartily. The world is no closer to a binding, enactable accord on preventing catastrophic climate change, but at least the Durban United Nations conference is over, and many are therefore sleepily rejoicing. |
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Yes, indeed they are. Everyone is entitled to hold their own particular opinion. In this democracy of ideas, every longshot, wingnut, bonehead, rogue, charlatan, conspiracy theorist, crank, crony and astroturfer should be permitted access to the microphone on the stage. If we hold a public meeting about immigration, we should, of course, invite a white supremicist, a member of the British National Party, and a Daily Mail journalist to offer us their wise words. If we hold a sociological symposium on the Second World War, we should of course invite a Holocaust-denier. If an engineering conference, a cold fusion-in-a-test-tube enthusiast. Of course we should provide balance, as much balance as possible, and offer wisdom, insight and rant from all ends of all spectra. It’s only reasonable.
It therefore goes without question that somebody from the Global Warming Policy Foundation “think tank”, so copiously and generously sponsored by a person or persons unknown, should be invited to speak on the platform, or in a panel, at a well-funded quasi-establishment meeting on Climate Change. Regardless of a complete lack of training in atmospheric physics, or even knowledge of the span of the last five years in the science of global warming, naturally, a GWPF man must be invited by GovToday to a presitigious conference to be held on 29th November 2011 in the City of London grandly entitled “2011 Carbon Reduction : The Transition to a Low Carbon Economy”.
People who know very little about renewable and sustainable energy continue to buzz like flies in the popular media. They don’t believe wind power economics can work. They don’t believe solar power can provide a genuine contribution to grid capacity. They don’t think marine power can achieve. They would rather have nuclear power. They would rather have environmentally-destructive new oil and gas drilling. They have friends and influence in Government. They have financial clout that enables them to keep disseminating their inaccuracies.
It’s time to ditch the pundits, innuendo artists and insinuators and consult the engineers.
Renewable Gas can stand in the gap – when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine and the grid is not sufficiently widespread and interconnected enough to be able to call on other wind or solar elsewhere.
Renewable Gas is the storing of biologically-derived and renewably-created gases, and the improving of the gases, so that they can be used on-demand in a number of applications.
This field of chemical engineering is so old, yet so new, it doesn’t have a fixed language yet.
However, the basic chemistry, apart from dealing with contaminants, is very straight-forward.
When demand for grid electricity is low, renewable electricity can be used to make renewable hydrogen, from water via electrolysis, and in other ways. Underused grid capacity can also be used to methanate carbon-rich biologically-derived gas feedstocks – raising its stored energy.
Then when demand for grid electricity is high, renewable gas can be used to generate power, to fill the gap. And the flue gases from this combustion can be fed back into the gas storage.
Renewable gas can also be biorefined into vehicle fuels and other useful chemicals. This application is likely to be the most important in the short term.
In the medium-term, the power generation balance that renewable gas can offer is likely to be the most important application.
Researchers are working on optimising all aspects of renewable gas and biorefinery, and businesses are already starting to push towards production.
We can have a fully renewable energy future, and we will.
| Sorry to say, but I think the people camping on the streets at @OccupyLSX and other places are not the real revolution. The real revolution is in energy. Democratisation of energy is the future – distributed, multi-level production systems, integrated pan-continental networks.
What ? Power to the people ? This is why the energy companies don’t like it so much, and why the corporate masters of the developed countries, and their shareholders, don’t want to have people believe in renewable and sustainable energy. | |
| This is why the newspapers are full of people disparaging renewable energy – journalists and commentators who know nothing about energy, who are not engineers and who don’t know who thought their ideas for them first. Wake up, media people, the future of energy will be zero carbon and fully of the people.
A little unauthrorised translation of what I could pick up from the trailer of a 2010 film (sorry, my German listening comprehension is very rusty) : “We are awash in energy. We are dependent on energy. How much energy is left for us ? Have we enough energy for a revolution ? How much must we pay for power ? Why must California nearly use as much electrical power as Africa ? (French) “We have this enormous potential – with the youth, the riches of Nature, the trees, the biomass, agriculture…but there is no progress…the catalyst is not there. And that’s electricity”. Do we need the big energy companies ? (German) “…energy concerns will become democratic…” The fourth revolution. Energy Autonomy.”
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| So, after rumours and quashings of rumours, Giles Fraser has resigned as canon chancellor of St Paul’s Cathedral, “resigned in protest at plans to forcibly remove demonstrators from its steps, saying he could not support the possibility of “violence in the name of the church”…Fraser, a leading leftwing voice in the Church of England, would resign because he could not sanction the use of police or bailiffs against the hundreds of activists who have set up camp in the grounds of the cathedral in the last fortnight.” |
But just why did Giles Fraser resign ? What has it achieved ? What could it possibly achieve ? Now he’s no longer in the Cathedral organisation he cannot influence what happens. What pressures has he had to endure behind the scenes that gave him no option but to jump ? Somebody I know has been praying that there would be heavy rain in London, just so the conditions would be impossible for the Occupyer camp to continue; that they would have to pack up and go home. What on Earth is this @OccupyLSX protest for ? A camp of principle, to defend the right to protest ? A camp of demands, pursuing a just economics and a just society ? A camp of non-violence, when it deliberately provokes a stand-off between demonstrators and police forces ? How can the Occupyers claim to be peaceful when they know their actions have a fragmentation bomb-like effect on the society around them ? How can the Cathedral Campers evidence their intentions for a juster, saner, economic system, when the net effect of their actions is likely to be a huge law court struggle at taxpayer expense ? It’s not a revolution, it’s an irritation – or at least that is the way that it will continue to be viewed by the governing authorities. Somebody on the inside track of campaigning in London has told me that the Occupy protest is destined to transmogrify into a Climate Refugee tent city in late November, early December. If it survives that long, then at least it can claim to be a piece of living art reflecting what is happening around the world because of climate change disasters. Unless and until the Occupyers can take on relevance, everybody with even just a slightly-left-of-centre agenda will attempt to co-opt the Occupy London camp for their own purposes. Remember, dear Occupyers, you are not “rising up” like the people in Libya – they were supplied with arms from around the world, forces overt and covert from Qatar, Europe and quite possibly America, and fed into a huge psychological operations narrative, ably supported by the media. The Libyan conflict wasn’t about Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, may he rest in peace. The information management of the North African and Middle Eastern unrest shows that mass propaganda still works, and that media consumers continue to fall for the same fabrications, time after time. | |
Image Credit : Debbie Portwood |
Unbelievably, yesterday, people in the British Government sacrificed their careers rather than vote with David Cameron’s three line whip against a Referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union. I say “unbelievably”, but I know full well why it happened. Democracy is broken in Britain, and there is every reason to point the finger of blame and accusation at the media, for their continued massacre of the issues in political debate. They should be observers and reporters; but instead they are influencers and arbiters. |
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Here’s how it goes : the Daily Mail, to take just one example, raises the outrage level, and repeats arguments that have little substance. People act on the basis of what they read in the papers and see on TV, and they develop poor reasoning, and do things like sign an ePetition. The thing gets publicly debated, partly in the media of course. And then finally the democratic representatives, the Members of Parliament, have to make a choice to stand with the stirred-up outrage or instead, vote with sanity. A vote on Europe would be a disaster. The wording would be over-simplistic and hide the true agenda. It would be too easy to sway people to vote for the worst option. |
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David Cameron was on one screen, and CBeebies was on another. I was on the treadmill at the gym, interval training, pacing at the same rhythm as the blaring RnB, and reading the teletext translation of the Parliamentary debate.
I smiled at Ed Miliband’s nasally-charged bluster. I rolled my eyes at the interventions from the Conservative dinosaurs. The Tories are the living example of the Bad Apple Theory, I thought to myself. One bad apple, or in their case, a clutch of Eurosceptics, spoils the crop. |
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The Conservative Party of the United Kingdom harbours a number of corporatists and the stooge friends of corporatists, and this is their basic argument – deregulate and private companies will be more productive and save the economy from implosion. It’s the same argument that nursed the financial services market that went ahead and created derivatives of risk, and produced toxic credit progeny in abundance and caused the collapse of the banks which caused the current economic doldrums. Great job ! We’ve got the Coalition Government’s Red Tape (Cutting Of) initiative in full-swing, as well as the Eurosceptics. Their argument is – the European Union is a hyperquagmire and over-regulates and stifles business and innovation, so the United Kingdom should secede. What they fail to acknowledge is that European Union legislation and regulation have created excellent conditions for trade, unifying the standards of production across the Common Market, and drawing on skillsets and technologies from across the region, has advanced productivity and standards of living for all. |
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| On Wednesday, I received a telephone call from an Information Technology recruitment consultancy. They wanted to know if I would be prepared to provide computer systems programming services for NATO.
Detecting that I was speaking with a native French-speaker, I slipped into my rather unpracticed second language to explain that I could not countenance working with the militaries, because I disagree with their strategy of repeated aggression. |
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| I explained I was critical of the possibility that the air strikes in Libya were being conducted in order to establish an occupation of North Africa by Western forces, to protect oil and gas interests in the region. The recruitment agent agreed with me that the Americans were the driving force behind NATO, and that they were being too warlike.
Whoops, there goes another great opportunity to make a huge pile of cash, contracting for warmongers ! Sometimes you just have to kiss a career goodbye. IT consultancy has many ethical pitfalls. Time to reinvent myself. I’ve been “back to school” for the second university degree, and now I’m supposed to submit myself to the “third degree” – go out and get me a job. The paucity of available positions due to the poor economic climate notwithstanding, the possibility of ending up in an unsuitable role fills me with dread. One of these days I might try to write about my experiences of having to endure several kinds of abuse whilst engaged in paid employment : suffice it to say, workplace inhumanity can be unbearable, some people don’t know what ethical behaviour means, and Human Resources departments always take sides, especially with vindictive, manipulative, micro-managers. I know what it’s like to be powerless. |
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Image Credit : npmeijer |
It rained last night in London. Cold rain. And the wind was blowing. And the poor little Occupyers were on my mind.
So I cooked up some vegan fare and this morning went down to St Paul’s Cathedral to try and offer nourishment to the be-weathered masses. Most of the placards and signs were gone, minimising the message, but the tent city was still there. |
| As usual at political protests, I took certain measures to disguise myself, and carried no form of identification.
Signs of the global economic meltdown – the train I wanted to catch was cut short – probably by the theft of metal cabling. It’s wrong to make the transport system grind to a halt – so many people depend on it. But I can understand why people are press-ganged into stealing metals – poverty is on the rise. It took me ages to reach St Paul’s Cathedral, and I went straight to the kitchen tent to unload lunch, and grab a coffea (tea mixed with coffee) and breakfast mini-croissant. |
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I think it was seeing a twenty-metre-high Robert Waterman McChesney projected to the audience at the Rebellious Media Conference that persuaded me I was being subjected to intense propaganda. These Americans, I thought, they’re all the same. They all use the same communications techniques, whatever brand of ideology they are pushing. The iconified “talking head” of Professor McChesney, well, yes, he was talking a lot of sense, but the medium is the message, and that medium was a twenty-metre-high idolisation of Bob. |
| After the opening plenary session of the conference, Noam Chomsky held humble court by the bookstalls, gladhanding people, and generally making nice to lots of unkempt teenagers and twenty-somethings in black tee shirts with nasty slogans on them. And nose rings. I was several circles of adulation beyond the physical contact zone, and beside me was a young mum desperate to put her cute infected infant in Noam’s great grandpa arms and get a photo apperture-nity of a lifetime. “Baby coming through”, I said, using my best crowd control voice-of-authority technique, “baby coming through”.
Noam Chomsky is very, very smart. And yet he still suffers from what I call “cognitive dissociation”. He deconstructed the demands of the Occupy Wall Street, Occupy Boston, Occupy everywhere movement – he said their feasible demands were too palatable, and their radical demands too inaccessible. But Noam, too, his ideas of a new labour-owned world are a step beyond unworkable. Being a pragmatist, I have recognised that people don’t automatically work well together without some kind of structure that they can slot into. Families, churches, governments – all need definitions of roles and functions, despite the ideal of total democratic freedom. |
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There are some people that believe that political goals are best pursued by public agitation; disturbance to the social order that will inevitably incur state repression of one form or another.
They tell you to go out and protest against violence in society, knowing full well that you will be met by violence in society. They want you to play the victim, the underdog. It serves their agenda – of keeping the population in abject despair. |
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Well, I’m here today to tell you that this is a fabulous deceit, and a monumentous waste of your time and energy. Demonstrations, marches, rallies, postcard writing campaigns, charity donations and sign-ups, banner dropping, occupation, camping out in tents on the street, web log tirades against injustice, Twitter tsunamis, viral web videos, online voting, in fact all of the commonly-undertaken forms of resistance – they don’t work. And all you will get for your trouble is disappointment. And possibly some physical incarceration or a bruise or two if you dare venture outside your door. And the opprobrium of your online forum, should you care to not join in with the staged protest. |
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| “This time it’s positive. This time it’s talking about building something new, not just protesting.”, Michael Albert, one of the inspirations behind Z Communications, says.
I can see the end of oppositional political dialogue. People will stop asking me to sign petitions, join protests, take part in camps, hoist angry placards, target this and that. No longer will people of good intentions shake donation tins when they see me, or print clever leaflets in order to engage my attention. |
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The Twitter flock will stop calling for opposition, for a new round of digital intifada against the wealthy and powerful. No longer will I be identified by what I am against. Instead I will be acknowledged for what I am for. |
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| “Show solidarity !”, they tell me. “Support the evolution !” “Strength through unity !”, they cry.
Well, I can’t support a revolution, except in the mind. So my call is : occupy your mind. Don’t let the rich buy your votes with false promises. Organise for political candidacy from the poor, the women, the marginalised of the country. Don’t let the media suck out your soul. Stop buying television. Stop playing violent computer games, stop believing violent films. Stop supporting warfare. |
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| A mass demonstration, a street occupation, lasts a few weeks, a few months, then evaporates. How are you going to make long term change happen ? How are you going to form the communities of the political future ?
Stop with the “litany of complaints”. Don’t demand a cloud in the sky, demand a single stepping stone of change. Don’t demand unfeasible goals. Think more clearly. More strategically. |
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| Some people may wonder why this YouTube starts halfway through a panel discussion from the Rebellious Media Conference at the weekend.
I certainly did. So I dug deep down in my appallingly scratchy notes and typed up a paraphrase of what Mark Curtis had said – the first speaker on the panel. Warning – it’s not verbatim – it is interpolated from my illegible handwriting. |
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“War and the Media” : Panel Discussion : Rebellious Media Conference […Tests the audience’s general knowledge about the world’s longest serving dictators…] It’s “Our Man in Oman”, Sultan Qaboos bin Said Al-Said. We don’t hear much about Oman. Why is that ? Let’s make two assumptions, first, that journalists can read, and second that they are following government sources. For the UK Government, foreign policy is increasingly about oil. UK has been developing relationships with the Gulf States. There is a policy of deepening support for the most undemocratic states in the region. Britain continues to project military power. You can see this in a hundred years of UK foreign policy – just read a few speeches. This is not what we are being told in the media. Was this a war for oil ? Is the Pope a Catholic ? In the media, the view [expressed] is that Britain is about supporting democracy in the Middle East. This country has two special relationships. The special relationship with the United States [of America] is about consumerism and investment. The other special relationship is much less [publicly] known [communicated]. Saudi Arabia since 1973 […] A problem – Saudi Arabia is funding radical Islam. And when Cameron […] in Bahrain…I wonder what they were talking about ? When Britain provides arms, the media reports that it contradicts our policy of promoting democracy – to maintain them in power. We don’t have a policy of upholding democracy. They are our allies. We don’t want them to fall. |
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Ed Miliband, leader of the British Labour Party, addressed the pre-party conference cameras in uncustomary casual attire, shelving his favourite suit, dazzlingly shiny tie and white shirt, you know, the one with the fat turned-over cuffs.
He sought to assure the nation that his one man mission is to relieve the financial pressure on the hardworking “squeezed middle” – fighting their corner against the profiteering railway companies and the moneygrabbing energy companies. |
| The little snippet of BBC TV News 24 that I saw cut to the correspondent raising doubts about whether this cost-of-living protection strategy would have any impact on the wider economy – whether measures to control transport fares and energy bills would create economic growth.
What does this little word “growth” mean to the BBC TV reporter, I asked myself. Does he think it means increasing employment, increasing incomes ? And how could employment be increased ? By increasing the “consumption” of goods, energy, water, transportation and knowledge economy services ? And how can this “aggregate demand” consumption be increased, if unemployment remains high and incomes remain stagnant ? Allowing the utility and transportation companies to raise their prices allows them to remain profitable and build their businesses, presumably creating employment as well as giving a return to investors – those who have their savings in pension funds – where the fund managers invest in energy and transport. Why not allow energy and transport prices to rise ? People can learn to spend more on these valuable services, surely ? Pensioners will have their funds protected, and energy and transport businesses will stay profitable, paying tax into the state. |
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Image Credit : Liberate Tate (Event Flyer)
The New Scientist magazine must be hard up. They’ve already bowed to economic pressure and taken the “king’s shilling” from the oil and gas industry by running Statoil advertisements, at least one made to look like a normal New Scientist article, giving Natural Gas a makeover as desirable as washing powder – all clean and reliable and loved by obsessives everywhere. Now they appear to have lost their power for critical reasoning and sunk to being suckers as billboards for BP spin, taking a front cover foldout for biofuels, with what I think is a completely deceitful portrayal of BP’s business.
While everybody’s busy discussing ethics in the media, today’s been a great day to bury bad news – the shelving of the Energy Bill – and with it the Green Deal, the only hope Britain had left of economic recovery in the short-term.
And what of the Electricity Market Reform white paper and the National Policy Statements on energy ? Into the round wastepaper-bin-shaped recycling receptacle, possibly.
What next ? The revocation of the Climate Change Act and the dissolution of the Committee on Climate Change ?
I don’t know whether I should make overt political statements, but I think this news sugar ices the brioche, so I will : David Cameron’s “greenest government ever” has failed.
We need Van Jones, right here, right now.
It is a newer, clearer tone that George Monbiot uses in his piece “The nuclear industry stinks. But that is not a reason to ditch nuclear power“. He seems to have lost his dirty annoyance with filthy anti-nuclear activists and moved onto a higher plane of moral certitude, where the air is cleaner and more refined.
He is pro-technology, but anti-industry. For him, the privately owned enterprises of atomic energy are the central problem that has led to accidents both of a radioactive and an accountancy nature. “Corporate power ?”, he asks, “No thanks.” The trouble is, you can’t really separate the failings of nuclear power from the failings of human power. It’s such a large, complex and dangerous enterprise that inevitably, human power systems compromise the use of the technology, regardless of whether they are publicly or privately owned. For a small amount of evidence, just look at the history of publicly-managed nuclear power in the United Kingdom. Not exactly peachy. And as for those who claimed that a “free” market approach to managing nuclear power would improve matters – how wrong they were. In my view, on the basis of the evidence so far, nobody can claim that nuclear power can be run as an efficient, safe, profit-making venture.
What if Venezuela is America’s new “frenemy” – the oil-producing trading friend that the United States just loves to hate ? They might not have an appetite or budget for military intervention, but considering the fossil fuel resources locked away under Venezuelan soil and sea, they might just be pleased at a change in the regime – and only one person would need to be removed to make that happen…
Since the economic sanctions were imposed on Venezuela by the USA, for trading with Iran, several very interesting events have transpired, several of them on the same day, 8 June 2011.
On one thing, Mark Lynas is right – the world cannot cope with more large hydropower dam projects – just look at what Rainfall Change has meant for power blackouts in South America.
However, yet again, he blurs the value of one of the central principles guiding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – inclusivity :-
https://www.marklynas.org/2011/06/new-allegation-of-ipcc-renewables-report-bias/
Who are the experts on climate change and energy ? We need to make sense of the various voices, and for that, we need to hear them all. The IPCC is the best platform we have – it is as neutral as it is possible for a host organisation to be.
Mark Lynas has just joined the Delayers-and-Deniers club, whose agenda has moved on from trying to take down Climate Change science to taking down any organisation that could help the policy and industry situation improve.
His contributions, including this comment at JudithCurry.com, betray his unwitting complicity in a destructive agenda :-
https://judithcurry.com/2011/06/17/an-opening-mind-part-ii/#comment-76593
Mark, they’re Americans. Americans believe in Free Speech. Americans are legally permitted to say anything they like, even if it has no factual basis. I know, there are lots of Canadians, Britannians and Australians in the Delayers-and-Deniers club, too, but the central point stands – all this grunting and dismissiveness about the IPCC is their way of distracting the public mind from the real problems we must face in changing the energy systems while we still have time – before it becomes a genuine crisis situation, where we can no longer act.
Who is completely independent, neutral or unbiased about Climate Change ? Who is completely independent, neutral or unbiased about Energy ?
Solving Climate Change requires solving Energy, and that requires solving the problems in democratic dialogue. The so-called Climate Change “skeptics” do not engage in forthright, honest, transparent dialogue, not even about energy. Back away from the grumblers, Mark !
I have my criticisms of the “corporate steal” of the United Nations Climate Change Framework Convention – issues of economic development and industrial investment have dominated the international conferences, and unworkable economics theories have snuck into the Kyoto Protocol and any other initiative you think of – including the emergence of proposals for Carbon Taxation and Carbon Trading schemes.
I also have criticisms of the communications structure within and around the IPCC – I think the IPCC reports should be written in such a way as to make sure that everybody can take in the full seriousness, urgency and momentum of what they are discussing.
Why are executives of major energy companies bothering to take part in the IPCC process ? Because they perceive that things cannot go on like they are. This is the same perception as held by those in Greenpeace and other non-governmental organisations and charities.
Nominate for me a set of people who are entirely independent, who cannot have a biased opinion about the future of energy and the environment, and I will place my trust in their review of the literature on Climate Change and Renewable Energy.
Failing that, I stick with the collage produced by the multi-viewed expert panel, corporate and non-corporate, part of the IPCC. There is nothing better than a totally open forum. Maybe International Rivers want to take part in future IPCC work ? If important views are being ignored, they need to be included from now on.
Allowing the Delayers-and-Deniers to keep setting the agenda is dangerous and disabling. We’ve already seen the success they had in derailing public acceptance of Climate Change science. Their latest plans include telling us that wind power and solar power don’t work. It would be laughable, except that the mainstream media keep repeating the lies :-
https://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/06/20/248246/solar-beats-peak-gas-today-cnbc/
Mark, your allegiance to the failing nuclear industry demonstrates that you have not understood that its promotion is one of the tactics of the Delayers-and-Deniers club to keep us from effective, long-term energy change.
By attacking anything that has the possibility of succeeding, they have a stranglehold on progress. Don’t give in to their agenda. We shouldn’t be fighting each other.
 | Dropping The Campaign Wrecking Ball
Intelligent commentators, authors and policy people are often suspicious of campaign groups. At the back of their minds they are drawing on a cultural discourse, primarily conducted in the media, that equates campaigners with mini-Hitlers – spreading disinformation and cult behaviour. It is true that – as Mein Kampf reveals – the National Socialists in Germany used the latest communications tools to coerce and channel the energy of democracy towards their goals. Some of the Nazi ambition was for democratic engagement, involvement in the process of rebuilding the country. Yet some of the methods were perverse, and caused an inexorable descent into the abuse of power. |
We’re never going to make any progress on climate change if those advocating for energy change are equated to early 20th Century dictators and totalitarians.
Energy is a Social Good
I recently wrote an essay called “Energy for Democracy” making a first attempt at connecting the dots on grassroots democratic mobilisation and energy change. The subject set was in the field of “Environmental Communication”, and so I went back and looked at the development of mass media, advertising and public persuasion. I then went on to think about how propaganda and governance are interrelated. And I also looked at philosophy, and politics. I looked at the early 20th Century ideological splits in Europe, and the part that industrial development played. I looked at how democratic and other forms of socialism dealt with the problem of energy.
I posited that, since energy is produced for the Common Good, it should be subject to democratic management. I found myself “channelling” the spirit of Ramsay Macdonald, and going back to the questions of society and the integration of new industries that were pervasive before the two so-called “World Wars”.
Energy Of A Similar Wavelength
And today I find this very theme picked up by Ulrich Beck in The Guardian newspaper, along with the expression “energy change”, which is a term I am using increasingly to encapsulate the pivotal and essential response to climate change :-
https://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/20/germany-nuclear-power-renewable-energy
“Germany is right to opt out of nuclear”, he headlines, “The rejection of nuclear power is a result not of German angst but of economic thinking. We must invest in renewable energy”.
I was gladdened when he stepped from economics to democratics :-
“…Ultimately, the rejection of nuclear is not a result of German angst but of economic thinking. In the long run, nuclear power will become more expensive, while renewable energy will become cheaper. But the key point is that those who continue to leave all options open will not invest…People everywhere are proclaiming and mourning the death of politics. Paradoxically, the cultural perception of the danger may well usher in the very opposite: the end of the end of politics…what is denounced by many as a hysterical over-reaction to the “risks” of nuclear energy is in fact a vital step towards ensuring that a turning point in energy generation becomes a step towards greater democracy…The novel coalition between the state and social movements of the kind we currently see at work in Germany now has a historic opportunity. Even in terms of power politics, this change of policy makes sense…”
The British are stumbling towards democracy, too, but they keep tripping over old divisiveness, and create new divisions too, just to complicate matters.
People Power – Not Potty Nor Puny
The Climate Camp has just been a baby step on the pathway to democratic movement on energy. Camping in coal trucks and dropping banners from power station cooling stacks has been a sign that democracy has been ailing – if there were genuine engagement between the governments, private enterprises and “campaign” groups over the future scenarios for energy, then people wouldn’t need to camp outside banks and coal-fired power plants.
As a consumer of mainstream media, all you see is the blockade of a Biofuel refinery, or people gluing themselves to the entrance of the Royal Bank of Scotland, or the occupation of a plant nursery at the site of a proposed runway. If you think “what a ramshackle bunch of unwashed hippies, straining the last of their voices, railing at the State, in a vain attempt to roll back the tide of industry, progress and Thorium reactors”, then you haven’t understood the bigger picture.
People want to be engaged in the decisions made about energy in this country – properly engaged. People want to use their knowledge to influence decisions. If the only means they have of expressing their democratic will and their opposition to hydraulic fracturing is to D-lock themselves to Shale Gas drilling equipment, then perhaps they might just do that. This might happen in Poland too. The alternative would be a proper discussion between the people groups and the governments. Where’s the European Union environmental legislature while all of this is happening ? Shale Gas could destroy Poland.
Energy Collectives – Expressing Collective Democratic Will
Groups like Fair Pensions are building momentum between people groups and investing institutions – raising the flag for clean energy. This isn’t about fighting – let’s drop the battlefield language, including that word “campaign”, which is so often used in a derogatory, dismissive, belittling way. This is about getting people working together on a new, sustainable future, and it requires all the righteous anger rising up to be channelled into a positive, productive movement, fully expressing the will of the people.
Consultations and placard-waving demonstration protests are not the way forward – we need energy change, and that’s going to require a whole lot more democratic energy. People don’t want dirty energy, and they don’t want nuclear power. Dirty energy should be asked to leave the building, nicely, politely. Firm but fair.
Group Thinking – Democratic Intelligence
Investment in renewable and sustainable energy is creating long-lasting assets for the UK and other countries. We don’t need and we don’t want dirty, radioactive energy any more. A thousand cheers for German democracy !
James Delingpole hardly ever sets his delicate foot in Wales, the country he archaically refers to as “the Principality”, apart from, ooh, about ten days a year when he holidays there, but nonetheless, feels he has some kind of inherited ex-colonial right to be affronted that large electricity generation and transmission infrastructure are going to be built there :-
He gets top marks for being rather offensive himself – achingly rude, in fact, about the Welsh Assembly, besides his getting untethered about the wind farms and pylons for the transmission cables :-
“…The wind farms are bad enough on their own. But to make matters far worse […], in order for these bird-crunching, bat-chomping, view-blighting, rent-seeking monstrosities to be connected to the grid a huge 400kv power line is going to be constructed all the way from Montgomeryshire through some of Britain’s most spectacular scenery to the equally beauteous Shropshire…”
