first published in weblog one hundred and twenty nine on Tuesday 9th May 2006

The fourth report of the International Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) is being finalised as I write. The second-order draft is up on the internet behind the citation ‘please do not cite, quote, or distribute the draft report’. It would be nice to be able to copy the report onto my hard drive and ignore it until the Sexed-up Dossier emerges next year. But nothing is ever quite that simple. Here are my marching orders…and I quote…

‘Because the report is still in draft, distribution of the materials for review will be through a password-protected website. If you are interested in reviewing the report, send a message …with your name and affiliation in the subject line…to ipcc-usgrev@climatescience.gov to obtain the username and password required to access the report. Then follow this link to download the report and to obtain explicit instructions regarding comments formatting.’ Nothing ventured nothing gained so I'll give it a whirl and report back on my success or otherwise.

All you do to run a company is increase the company’s income and reduce its expenses. You increase income by raising the price of your products and you reduce expenses by getting somebody else to pick up the tab. Oil has shot up in price since the Bilderberg Boys decided to go for it. The bigger you are the bigger the pocket you must pick. The biggest pockets are public pockets. Big corporations have become adept at wheedling money out of taxpayers.

What better way to transfer a sixty billion pound Clean-up Budget from the Nuclear Fiasco Industry to the Public Purse than to roll out the 80 year-old James Lovelock to extol the joys of spent fuel lumps for home heating and reallocating Nuclear Clean-up money to Global Warming?

What better way to get the Public Purse to pay to swap out the petrol in petrol station for some new piped fuel such as hydrogen or cornoil than to invent Climate Change and promote a theory that blames it all on Carbon Emissions? This is probably all you need to know about Global Warming. Adam Smith would have been sceptical too.

Spent fuel rods in your gardens will do wonders for the shrubbery. Wildlife is flourishing inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. In one of Tom Paxton’s song a father is telling his daughter about flowers. It was quite hard for him to explain them to her because she had never seen any.

more from Shepherd on Climate

first published as weblog one hundred and twenty seven on Sunday 7th May 2006

Questioning Global Warming Orthodoxy instantly banishes you to outer darkness…with holocaust deniers and conspiracy theorists as your cellmates. The abuse poured on Michael Crichton for getting State of Fear into the US bestsellers list is a case in point. Use Goggle to locate the columns of journalistic vitriol. Psychologically this is perhaps more interesting than the fear that a challenge to the global warming orthodoxy itself engenders. Let me discuss the Scientific Enterprise as seen by a former Minister for Science and Technology in a Socialist Government.

Scientific tradition derives from six main principles: (1) an insistence upon maintaining a rigorous regime of accurate scholarship; (2) a practice of subjecting hypotheses arising from research to the critical scrutiny of the scientific community which then judges those results by the highest possible standards; (3) a determination to defend and entrench academic freedom to protect scientists from improper pressures which might lead them to abandon their research or to corrupt their results to suit the powers that be; (4) an acceptance of the importance of dissent within the scientific tradition allowing scientists to seek to establish new hypotheses even though these may run counter to the conventional scientific wisdom of the day; (5) the maintenance of an output which overrides political, theological or ideological divisions between nations; (6) the assertion of the importance of publishing results so that the whole world may benefit from the new knowledge as it is acquired.

In Dare To Be A Daniel Tony Benn then goes on to contrast these scientific traditions and principles with the ideas that lie at the root of parliamentary democracy. Benn’s view…which was also the official view of Sir James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party when I stood as their Parliamentary Candidate for Oldham West and Royton in 1997... is that in Britain the idea of democracy is not based on the sovereignty of Parliament or Government but upon ‘the sovereignty of the people as a whole who have a moral right to govern themselves.’ By exercising their vote they lend their sovereign powers to members of Parliament to be used on their behalf for the duration of a single parliament…and these powers must be returned intact to the electorate to lend again at a subsequent election.’

Benn then points out that ‘in the end the people can dismiss ministers without bloodshed, and replace them by others’ and that it is this ‘destructive power of democracy that gives it its vitality, because ministers who know they can be dismissed are obliged to listen.’ So Benn’s democratic theory rests on being able to kick the rascals out because ‘in this way the capacity to dismiss changes the relationship between those who govern and those who are governed.’

For Benn the role of the elected representative is not to reproduce the expertise of the expert but to subject him or her to rigorous cross-examination on behalf of the people. In Dare To Be A Daniel the 80-year old veteran of countless socialist rallies…and the best Prime Minister this country never had… is reflecting on projects that came up on his watch…like Concorde and Nuclear Power rather than Climate Change. But general principles are just that and indicate the direction he was leaning in his thinking. Here are the first nine of Benn’s Ten Questions for Scientists.

1. Would your project promise benefits to the community? What are they? To whom and when will they accrue?
2. What are the disadvantages? Who experiences them? What remedies might correct them? And when?
3. What are the demands on skilled manpower? Can this be met?
4. Is there a cheaper, simpler, less sophisticated way to achieve all or part of the objectives? What are the options?
5. What new skills would people need to acquire? How are they to be created?
6. What old skills would be rendered obsolete? How serious is this for those involved?
7. Is the work being done elsewhere? Is there experience elsewhere to help assess the proposed project?
8. If the project happens what disadvantages would accrue to the community? What are the alternative approaches?
9. What other supporting projects are needed to cope with consequences or subsequent stages?

Benn regarded his tenth question as very important. ‘If an initial decision to proceed is made, for how long will the option to stop remain open, and how reversible will this decision be at progressive stages beyond there.’ It is on this tenth point that I took Kirk Sale to task in an e-mail exchange this week when commenting on the Global Warming lobby’s abuse of the Precautionary Principle…which has now become a policy of convenience to environmentalists.

The Precautionary Principle should mean that we do not meddle around implementing half-cock solutions that are just as likely to make matters worse...the dynamics of complex systems often means that things get worse before they get better for instance...until we understand what their long-term and intermediate impacts will be. The Precautionary Principle is being misapplied to justify ignorant meddling in very complicated processes that are not understood.

By the way I should warn you that Michael Crichton owns the patent for ‘essay or letter criticizing a previous publication’. So I am taking this stance on Global Warming to avoid getting sued…and not because of threats by right wing corporations to withdraw their funding of my Life of Reilly as a Mad Blogger and Journeyman Tenor.

more from Shepherd on Climate

first published in weblog one hundred and twenty on Sunday 30th April 2006

The power of the military-industrial complex began to wane after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of the politico-legal-media complex (PLM). I had occasion to discuss this in an exchange of e-mails with Tom Greco earlier this week about my intention to go public with my misgivings about the Global Warming bandwagon. The exchange went like this.

Tom Greco had written in response to my e-mail on Global Warming that it seemed to him there were far better uses for 'my considerable talents' (Hmm!). ‘Why not focus on what we can do something about rather than idle debates about matters that may or may not eventuate? Time will tell about that.’ I begun my reply by writing that I though we might be at cross-purposes on this. This is how I continued.

I have absolutely no intention of getting involved in the Global Warming Issue and will not be taking sides as an activist for or against... if this is what you fear. But I have some deep generic concerns about where this whole Global Warming issue has come from and it is these that I will be highlighting once a week in my Sunday weblogs over the next few weeks...in the second volume of my three volumes in 2006. Let me try to give some sort of overarching paradigm for this.

The military-industrial complex is not the primary driver of society. It all changed when the Berlin Wall came down. For the past two decades we have been under the control of an entirely new complex...the politico-legal-media complex (PLM)...which is far more powerful and far more pervasive and is dedicated to promoting fear under the guise of promoting security.

Western nations are actually really safe and secure by any objective standards yet people are being made to feel insecure by the PLM. And the PLM is powerful and stable precisely because it unites so many institutions of society. Politicians need fears to control the population; lawyers need dangers to litigate and make money; the media need scare stories to capture an audience and so on. These three estates are where power is being exercised...the tail that is wagging the dog...and the place where much funding is going...to such an extent that they can go about their business even if the scare is totally groundless.

And then there's academia. Global Warming facts are coming out of the ivory towers’ computer models…and there is no longer any disinterested Public Science Forum to verify the data and adjudicate between rival scientific claims. The universities have invented a new role for themselves as the factories of fear. They invent all the new terrors and all the new social anxieties; all the new restrictive codes; the words you can't say; the thoughts you can't think. They produce a steady stream of new anxieties, dangers and social terrors to be used by politicians, lawyers and reporters. Foods that are bad for you; behaviours that are unacceptable. Can't smoke, can't swear, can't think etc. Dr Aidan Rankin was getting close in his focus on political correctness...but this is just one part of a much larger complex.

In the course of pulling together my Global Warming research to write my Sunday weblogs...I will be trying to clarify why I believe the issues behind the emergence of Global Warming are very pertinent to concerns such as reclaiming the commons, evolving strategies for our peace parties to outwit their War Party etc. I see it as a brief but necessary diversion to make sure radical politics does not get spun off into the weeds and lose sight of the ball.

Once I have had my say about this I think we can start looking at how the money boys keep the whole of the PLM show on the road…because there may be some way to cut off the funding at the pass…once we find out where we should be setting up our ambush.

One final little remark...at the personal psychological level, fear and love are directly opposed to each other...so if there is an axis of evil anywhere then this is where it is...and this is where the battle between Good and Evil may need to take place. i.e. the personal response to all this is to refuse to be made insecure and Make Love Not War...which brings us full circle to the sixties and the hippies where we all grew up. We were actually right all along. That at least is probably what this Sunday's weblog will say. And that is what it said.

more from Shepherd on Climate

first published in weblog one hundred and fifteen on Tuesday 25th April 2006

Global Warming was invented in 1988 by a prominent climatologist James Hansen. At the time he was giving testimony before a joint House and Senate Committee headed by Senator Wirth of Colorado. Hearings were scheduled for June so Hansen could deliver his testimony during a blistering heat wave. This would be fair enough for a Press Conference but Public Science should be beyond such ploys. However this was no isolated incident of media manipulation. Global Warming is awash with dodgy dossiers. Dossiers about Weapons of Mass Destruction are paragons of integrity by comparison.

In the late 1980s the United Nations formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which comprises a huge group of bureaucrats…and scientists under the thumb of bureaucrats. The idea was that since this was a global problem the UN would track climate research and issue reports every few years. The first assessment report in 1990 said it would be very difficult to detect a human influence on climate although everybody was concerned that one might exist. But the 1995 report announced with conviction that there was now ‘a discernible human influence’ on climate…echoes of the 45-minute claim when Alistair Campbell sexed up the WMD Dossier.

Much the same happened to the 1995 IPCC Dossier. Originally the document said scientists couldn’t detect a human influence on climate for sure, and they didn’t know when they would. They said explicitly, ‘we don’t know.’ The statement was deleted and replaced with a new statement that a discernible human influence did indeed exist. It was a major change…and one that caused a stir among scientists at the time with opponents and defendants of the change coming forward. If you read their claims and counter-claims you can’t be sure who’s telling the truth. But a review of the actual text changes makes it crystal clear that the IPCC is a political organisation and not a scientific one.

Back to James Hansen. In the summer of 1988 he accompanied his global warming announcement with a prediction that temperatures would increase 0.35 degrees Celsius over the next ten years. The actual increase was 0.11 degrees and this prompted him to state…along with his fellow authors Makiko Sato, Andrew Lacis, Reto Ruedy, Ina Tegen and Elaine Matthews…in a 1998 article Climate Forcings in the Industrial Era in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (127533-58) that ‘the forcings that drive long-term climate change are unknown with an accuracy sufficient to define future climate change.’ arguing for scientists to use multiple scenarios in future.

The problem is that climate is very complicated…so complicated in fact that no one has been able to predict future climate with accuracy…even though billions of dollars are being spent and hundreds of people are trying all around the world. Nobody is trying to predict weather more than ten days ahead but computer modellers are predicting what the temperature will be one hundred years in advance…sometimes a thousand years…three thousand years. And they are probably doing worse than the weathermen. The biggest events in global climate are the El Niños. They happen roughly every four years. But climate models can’t predict them - not their timing, their duration, or their intensity. Climate science simply isn’t there yet…not by a long chalk. It may be one day. But not now.

As for David Cameron’s trip to Norway. Like Sweden, Iceland, Canada, Siberia, Alaska, the Alps, the Himalayas and Mount Kilamanjaro, Norway has nothing to contribute to the scientific case for Global Warming. 94% of all the ice in the world is elsewhere…4% in Greenland and 90% in Antarctica where the ice is 5 to 6 miles thick in places. This merely reinforces the need for an impartial forum for Public Science. What Cameron is doing is media manipulation.

The irony is that Cameron’s key adviser on environmental matters is Zac Goldsmith who took over the editorship of his uncle’s scientific journal The Ecologist and to Edward Goldsmith’s horror has destroyed everything that Teddy had built up over the years. The impartial and respected scientific journal that once reported scientific facts and the considered opinions of leading scientists in the new field of Ecological Science is now no more than a glossy purveyor of ethical chic for the chattering classes. With The Ecologist Zac Goldsmith has done for ecology what Satish Kumar has done for politics with Resurgence.

more from Shepherd on Climate

first published in weblog one hundred and eleven on Friday 21st April 2006

In the United Kingdom the latest leader of the Conservative Party has been on a three-day fact-finding mission to see at first hand the impact of climate change. David Cameron’s 15-mile journey by dog sled…the ultimate in environmental friendliness…took place on the Svalbard Peninsula in Norway. Big mistake. Spitzbergen is definitely not the place to go for a photo opportunity on glaciers and the melting of the Arctic ice.

Some computer models tell us that higher temperatures in the Arctic lead to more snowfall as more water is evaporated off the oceans and carried north on the prevailing winds. Conclusion? Glacial Advance. Unfortunately other computer models predict that warmer weather will lead to less precipitation…and Glacial Retreat. In the Svalbard Peninsula both processes are taking place at the same time…in different glaciers. Some climate is local.

Here was another problem. Before David Cameron jumped on his canine caravan he had to get to Norway. So he arranged to be driven from London to Farnborough in Hampshire by Government Car. Over the 38-mile journey his Vauxhall Omega spewed out 30 lbs of carbon dioxide. At Farnborough he boarded a 10-seater private jet which flew him and his entourage to Longyearbyen in Svalbard…a distance of 1909 miles. Another five tons of carbon dioxide per passenger into the atmosphere. The coordinators of the trip…World Wildlife Fund-UK…insisted that all carbon emissions would be offset using Gold Standard credits which will cost the Conservative Party a total of £200. So that’s all right then.

more from Shepherd on Climate

first published in weblog one hundred and seven on Monday 17th April 2006

Most small towns in England have a local environment group. Here in Rye it is the Rother Environmental Group looked after by Christopher Strangeways. They brought the Wednesday Farmers’ Market to Rye. One vital function performed by these environmental groups is to monitor planning. No subject breeds more copious paperwork. A few paragraphs later I introduced Woking’s carbon emissions strategy. Here is most of the rest of the article.

Woking Borough Council calculated that in 1990 their population of ninety thousand souls emitted collectively a million tons of carbon dioxide. They read the report by The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution and decided to see if they could reach the report’s targets by reducing these emissions by eighty percent. They never asked anyone’s permission. Who’s business is it other than their own? They just went ahead.

Woking did not feel the need for a Kyoto Treaty with Wokingham. Nobody came up with the idea of a Carbon Emission Trading Exchange for Berkshire. There were no thoughts that their share of the sixty billion pounds promised for cleaning up Nuclear Power Plants should be diverted to a County Fund for Countering Global Warming…as James Lovelock has proposed. They just had a few bright people think about the local problem of carbon emissions and come up with a local plan and a local strategy to reduce their own pollution to 200 000 tons.

One key element in Woking’s local plan is to convert the town to combined heat and power sources of energy. How can a town do such a thing? Actually quite easily. The economies of scale are one of the myths of our age. Producing your own power is much more efficient than taking electricity from the National Grid. Most fuel cells run on hydrogen but there are some that convert natural gas to energy at the cost of little more than a conventional boiler. Gas consumption is unchanged but electricity is generated as a byproduct. There are 25 million households in this country and British Gas who will be backing the Ceres micropower initiative reckons two thirds of them are suitable for these home micro-power plants…like disconnecting your BT landline and going with Skype.

Buying electricity from unscrupulous foreign-based intermediaries and letting the French off the pollution hook by paying rigged prices for the surplus nuclear electricity they clandestinely pipe through the Channel Tunnel is a mug’s game. Rye does not need to play. After all, what is best? A small group in Rye battling for the public weal or a small group in positions of power (presumed to be) battling for it for the nation at large?

The Rye Town Region has a tenth the population of Woking so our carbon dioxide emissions will be around 100 000 tons per year. The town should reduce this to 10 000 tons. That will bring in tourists from all around the world to find out how we did it. Next year’s Independent Rye Town Council should join with other like-minded town councils in associations like the South East Climate Change Partnership to claim back real Local Public Powers over airborne pollution as an extension of their responsibility for land-bourne pollution such as sewerage.

Rye Town Council already has the right to be consulted on planning matters. The new council should not feel itself limited to reclaiming old powers that have fallen into disuse. It should get ahead of the game and start wielding Future Public Powers locally. It should insist that Planning Applications within the town…and by agreement with the surrounding parishes also within the Rye Town Region…comply with Rye Local Plan Carbon Emission Targets. One of the golden rules of power is that it must be won. Sometimes this can be done without a fight.

Christopher Strangeways may have missed out by 111 votes in the May 2006 elections but his slate of a couple of dozen new local candidates from an Independent Democratic Rye Party should be a shoo-in 12-months hence when all sixteen council seats are up for grabs. It is time that Rye once again had a local scene of disinterested and dedicated citizens devoting their lives to making things better for the people in Rye and her surrounding parishes.

As such people start to acquire real power to make real decisions on local affairs…rather than to serve on powerless committees…so they will involve more and more local people in their work and the present cult of passivity in politics will start to change. When asked how to invigorate democracy my thoughts never turn to Messrs. Blair-Brown, Cameron or anyone up there to tell us local people how to run our local matters. ‘What do you thing of John Major?’ my mother once asked me. ‘I don’t think of John Major,’ was my response. Instead here in Rye…and in all the other Ryes around the country…I turn to good people like Sonia Holmes, John Izod, Jo Kirkham, Christopher Strangeways and others whom I know can be trusted.

more from Shepherd on Climate

first published in weblog ninety six on Thursday 6th April 2006

In The Ecology of Money Richard Douthwaite argues that ‘an international currency should be based on the global resource whose use it is highly desirable to minimize’. Actually he doesn’t argue this but merely states it. So this is a premise. Bear that in mind. Douthwaite then picks up the old Limits to Growth argument from 30 years ago. Economic growth needs piped energy, piped energy and economic growth produce pollution and pollution brings economic growth to a shuddering halt. The structure of Jay Forrester’s System Dynamics model for his World Dynamics modelling ensured that collapses were suitably dramatic…good visual effects. With me so far?

This is where Global Warming enters the argument. But first a cautionary note. Please remember that nearly everything in today’s weblog is either an assumption based on pretty dodgy science or a computer projection based on pretty dodgy parameters and incomplete theories. Global Warming is not caused by all piped energy but by bad piped energy...let’s call it BPE. Gross National Product is an arithmetical sum of goods and bads...and hence pretty meaningless...so goodness knows how the economists will cope with these BPEs. But that is their worry and not ours.

Enter the Global Commons Institute and their Contraction & Convergence agenda. We The World can stop Global Warming dead in its tracks, they claim, by reducing global carbon dioxide emissions. Think ration books in the Hitler War and coupons for Carbon Dioxide Emissions. Hey presto! You’ve got yourself a scarce resource. And a scarce resource is just what is needed for an international currency. Hold on to your hats. We are nearing the currency link.

In New York seven years ago a book was published entitled Kingpins of Carbon: How Fossil Fuel Producers Contribute to Global Warming. It included the interesting fact that 80% of the fossil carbon that ends up as man-made carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere comes from only 122 producers of carbon-based fuels. So the idea is that someone somewhere guesstimates how much Carbon Dioxide can be emptied into the atmosphere each year and expresses these annual emissions as Ration Book Coupons. This is what then happens to these coupons.

The Competent Receivers of these Carbon Emission Coupons sell them to the Gang of 122 who receive them in addition to cash from big users such as the electricity companies and the oil and coal merchants. This forces the wicked polluters to pay an arm and a leg for all the foul fumes they spew out into the atmosphere. This leads to shareholder profits plummeting and so they pull their money out and invest in profitable new carbon-free technologies like the 600-year old Windmill Business and the 60-year old Nuclear Fission Steam Kettle Industry.

So far so good. But you got there before me. Who? Whom? Who hands out these coupons to whom? The current ideas doing the rounds talk about half of them going to ordinary people as Domestic Tradable Quotas (DTQs) so we can pay our energy bills with them instead of paying in cash. Someone has already designed the credit cards. The other half get auctioned off like the 3G licences for mobile phone companies. Economists from the University of Chicago have proved that auctions are an efficient way to allocate scarce resources. So that’s alright then.

You were there before me again. Who decides? And what happens to the money? The Global Commons Institute has worked out how to put the International Monetary Fund in charge. The IMF would assign Special Emission Rights (SERs) to national governments every month, issue the energy backed currency units (ebcus) and fix their value relative to the SERs. Then The Great and The Good would spend the money on noble causes like renewable energy development and energy conservation. If your mind is wandering in the direction of Lottery and Arts funding and sees Her Majesty’s Treasury at every turn you may feel a little sceptical about the whole scheme.

But why not think instead of Parish Councils with real teeth run by Pillars of Local Communities. Or a devolved version of the National Trust with hundreds or thousands of Local Community Trusts holding Brussels Milk and Fish Quotas, buying up local farmland when it comes on the market and administering the local libraries and community halls left to local people in the estates of local benefactors? Governments need us. We really don’t need them at all.

more from Shepherd on Climate

first published as weblog ninety five on Wednesday 5th April 2006

Three years ago Fourth World Review published a long essay of mine entitled Energy Wars. The main thrust of the article was that piping energy around the place made sense to monopolists and elites intent upon controlling and profiting from the demand for piped energy. But for the rest of us local energy catchment...the Woking Strategy...was the way to go.

In arguing my case I remarked on the dwindling importance of oil in the future of piped energy. Putting ignorance and cock-up aside...despite the fact that these loom large on the international stage where miscalculation seems to be the norm...this means that the Anglo-American grab for Iraq’s oil was an insufficient justification for the costs of an invasion and the maintenance of a permanent presence in Mesopotamia. Think of the people, the money and the energy costs. Wars use up an awful lot of energy. The Iraq War energy account might even be in net deficit.

Hence I argued that the real reasons for the invasion of Iraq were not oil but the extension of the techniques of Central Banking into the Moslem World and of course to shore up the State of Israel by more direct means than hand-outs from the long-suffering American taxpayer. Confirmation of the latter has recently come to light with the publication of the Walt and Mearscheimer report on The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. Incidentally in case you took my earlier remarks about this for an April Fool the lads from Harvard’s John F Kennedy School of Government have written a short version for The London Review of Books.

But my case also rested on my review of the future development proposed by energy producing industries in the fossil fuel business, the nuclear fission and fusion fiascos and the more hopeful worlds of hydrogen and solar energy (wind, wave, biofuels etc). It was in this context that I mentioned Buckminster Fuller’s proposal in his 1981 book Critical Path of a Global Electricity Grid and the emergence after its construction of the Kilowatt-Hour as the Global Reserve Currency to take the place once held by gold. Here is what Bucky had to say in Critical Path (page 206).

It is engineeringly demonstrable that there is no known way to deliver energy safely from one part of the world to another in larger quantities and in swifter manner than by high-voltage-conducted ‘electricity’. For the first half of the twentieth century the limit-distance of technically practical deliverability of electricity was 350 miles. As a consequence of the post-World War II space programme’s employment and advancement of the invisible metallurgical, chemical and electronics more-with-lessing technology, twenty five years ago [now fifty] ir became technically feasible and expedient to employ ultra-high-voltage and superconductivity which can deliver electrical energy within a radial range of 1500 miles from the system’s dynamo generators.

To the World Game seminar of 1969 Buckminster Fuller presented his integrated, world-around, high-voltage electrical energy network concept. Employing the new 1500-mile transmission reach, this network made it technically feasible to span the Bering Straits to integrate the Alaskan USA and Canadian networks with Russia’s grid, which had recently been extended eastward into northern Siberia and Kamchatka to harness with hydroelectric dams the several powerful northwardly flowing rivers of north-easternmost USSR. This proposed network would interlink the daylight half of the world with the nighttime half.

Fuller argued that electrical energy integration of the night and day regions of the Earth will bring capacity into use at all times, thus overnight doubling the generating capacity of humanity because it will integrate all the most extreme night and day peaks and valleys. From the Bering Straits, Europe and Africa will be integrated westwardly through the USSR and China; Southeast Asia and India will become network integrated southwardly through the USSR. Central and South America will be integrated southwardly through Canada, the USA and Mexico.

Bucky’s idea is a dream-come-true for the lovers of macro-engineering projects. But it has two fundamental flaws. Firstly security. The power line will always be down somewhere. How can anyone stop the Global Electricity Grid being blown up by insurgents?

Secondly who needs it? The underlying energy truth is that the energy commons is not for privatising. Energy is not a scarce resource. In half an hour our world gets all the energy it needs for a whole year. Nature is prolific. The sun showers us with thousands of times more energy than we will ever need. The only energy pipes we truly need are within our village or parish electricity and hot water grids. All the other energy being piped around is not for the benefit of the users but for the profits of the pipe owners and the energy commodity monopolisers.

Bernard Daly read my Energy Wars article on the internet and e-mailed me to ask whether the world electricity grid was the only way that an energy-backed currency could work. My answer was no. They can evolve from within our existing energy and monetary infrastructures. As a result the idea is gaining support. Tomorrow’s weblog will discuss Douthwaite’s thinking behind Energy Backed Currency Units (ebcus) and Special Emission Rights (SERs).

more from Shepherd on Climate

first published in weblog eighty eight on Wednesday 29th March 2006

This week The Independent has been putting out supplements on Global Warming. Today it was the turn of its readers. There were two things that struck me. Firstly nearly all the letters, while well-meaning and sensible to the writer, were based on much ignorance. Secondly solutions to global warming fell into three categories: world government must do this, our government must do that and each of us must do our bit and turn off the lights.

The Archbishop of Canterbury was on BBC Radio Four the other day being quizzed about Global Warming and he took much the same tack…although it was good to see him insisting that the Anglican Church had a moral duty to address the problem instead of contemplating its collective navel by going on and on and on about women priests and homosexual curates. But Rowan Williams is missing an opportunity to make Her Majesty’s Church relevant again.

Neither the United Nations, nor David Cameron’s Conservatives nor The Man in the Street can solve the problem of Global Warming. It can only be addressed from outside the mindset…and the institutional structure…that created the problem in the first place. District Councils, County Councils, the Westminster Parliament, The City, Whitehall, Brussels, the World Bank, IMF and WTO, multinational companies…none of these can solve the problem.

But in sharp contrast to every other seat of power in the land Rowan Williams is blessed with an institutional structure that can solve the problem. In doing so, the English Church can act as a beacon for the rest of the world. Villages and urban parishes are capable of cleaning up their own local acts in a way governments can’t.

Parishes can reclaim the power to act on Global Warming within their own boundaries and in collaboration with their neighbours. The Anglican Church could lead the charge. The key to success is not global treaties or legislation or exhortation but working together in local communities across the land and across the world…village by village and parish by parish.

England's Climate & Energy Politics by William Shepherd

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first published in weblog eighty five on Sunday 26th March 2006

I spent a hundred minutes on the phone with my daughter in the evening which must be my longest ever phone call to her. She reckons I am wasting my time trying to wheedle out the facts behind global warming.

I first did some work on this at the end of 2004 with a view to giving Fourth World Review a review of Michael Crichton’s State of Fear. However Crichton’s line about the falsification of the environmentalists’ case...and the convincing evidence he brought to bear in support of his view...meant that I needed to do more delving before publishing a controversial review.

I also hoped that a colleague would read State of Fear and give me some moral support but that has not yet happened.

Anyway to cut a long story short I am now convinced that my work got lost in one of my dongle and computer collapses so I have been recreating everything from an old draft in hard copy and some scribbled notes.

more from Shepherd on Climate

first published in weblog seventy seven on Saturday 18th March 2006

Global warming is the theory that increased levels of carbon dioxide and certain other gases are causing an increase in the average temperature of the earth’s atmosphere because of the greenhouse effect.

Imagine the composition of the earth’s atmosphere as a 100 yard football field. Most of the atmosphere is nitrogen so starting from the goal line this will get you to the seventy-eight yard line. Nearly all of what is left is oxygen which takes you to the ninety-nine yard line. Most of what remains after that is the inert gas argon which brings you to within three and a half inches of the goal line. That’s pretty much the thickness of the chalk stripe. How much of the remaining three inches is carbon dioxide? One inch. That’s how much CO2 we have in our atmosphere. One inch in a hundred yard football field. And do you know how much it has increased on our football field in the last 50 years? Three eighths of an inch…less than the thickness of a pencil.

Carbon dioxide is used by plants to photosynthesise. The plants take in the gas via small openings on the surface of their leaves called stomata that can open and close in response to atmospheric conditions and the plant needs. When the stomata are open some water is lost in a process called plant transpiration…plants sweat. Laboratory experiments have shown plants become more efficient in the presence of greater levels of carbon dioxide so the stomata do not open as often or for as long. More carbon dioxide means less transpiration which means more water stays in the soil.

It seems to be a well-known fact that the flow of many rivers around the world is increasing even though rainfall has changed very little in the last few decades. Aha…you have got there before me. Scientists and propagandists for global warming have their pseudo-scientific link between carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and rising sea levels. More water in the soil means more runs off into rivers which explains the increase in river flow and must lead in the fullness of time…and with the right parameters in the computer models…to the inundation of low-lying cities like New Orleans within all our lifetimes.

But sea levels are not rising…the last time I looked at the data a year or so ago there was no discernible shift over the past few decades. Of course sea levels move around. There was a disaster in Queensland over the weekend with sea levels changing by up to twelve feet for instance. And have you heard of tides? My sea level goes up and down like a yo-yo twice a day and the waters of the North Atlantic Ocean swirl around like water in a cooking basin. And do you remember in the days before the invention of global warming all the concern about the increasing run-off all over the world as hills were stripped of their trees and intensive agriculture decimated the natural vegetation cover. Increased run-off? Of course. But caused by plants getting fitter and sweating less in their extra fraction of an inch of carbon dioxide. Pull the other one. What complete and utter baloney.

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first published in weblog fifty three on Wednesday 22nd February 2006

A little after midday I returned to the moorings on the Rye Harbour Road and lit the fire. Outside a gang of men and machines were feverishly demolishing my sloe bushes and white hawthorn trees...new source of berries for my sloe gin required for next Christmas. Nobody seems to know what or why this is happening but the assumption is that it is the preparatory work for hammering in pilings on our side of the river...the other side was piled last year.

All this frantic work is part of a big spend inflicted on the public purse by the private insurance companies who have persuaded the politicians that the country will be flooded by global warming sea-level rises so the realm must be protected by hundreds of public works all around the country. Future generations will find that this was one of the biggest scams of the century.

Last time I looked...about a year ago...there was no scientific evidence of changes in sea levels. There is a lot of noisy chatter about the Arctic but the Antarctic has nearly all the unmelted water so is the only area needing careful watching...and here the evidence goes both ways suggesting just the normal fluctuations in local weather systems. Then there is the temperature curve for the last six million years…see below. This shows a three-million year period when it was several degrees warmer than today followed by a three-million year cooling trend accompanied by an increase in the magnitude of the pervasive higher frequency cold and warm climate cycles.

When people talk about the world being run by computers they are right. But they are quite wrong about the details. Computers run the world by falsely modelling the future. Academics in their ivory towers invent new fears which they then impose upon an increasingly gullible public by producing computer models that forecast dire consequences from their self-fulfilling theories. There should be a warning on all academic research. CAUTION: This research is based on computer modelling.

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first published in weblog forty six on Wednesday 15th February 2006

Temperatures on Planet Earth have been static over the past eight years according to Professor Bob Carter.

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first published in weblog forty five on Tuesday 14th February 2006

Disaster has struck. My monitor has given up the ghost. The timing was interesting. At the end of 2004 I started working on a long essay against global warming...or rather against the conventional wisdom surrounding the hype about global warming. I got up at four this morning intent on revisiting my last draft and spending a day or two preparing my long essay for restricted distribution. It was at this point that my monitor refused to crank up. It has now gone to the skip.

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first published in weblog twenty three on Monday 23rd January 2006

Twenty years ago I wrote an essay entitled Green Houses or Blue Moon Waves in which I discussed the work of the marine scientist Otto Pettersson. My sole source was a book first published in 1950 entitled The Sea Around Us by Rachel Carson. My manuscript remains unpublished but I included the Otto Pettersson section in The Art of Fine Publishing which I posted onto my website last year.

However Otto Pettersson's work remains unknown buried with the object of his research at the bottom of the Skaggerak. A year ago I did a Google search which confirmed his obscurity and prompted me to write away to Oslo University for more information about the gentleman and his work. Today’s search came back with 415 references to this great scientist. And my comments were right up there on the top page in fifth position.

The background to this tale is that while browsing in the Ashford County Library I chanced across a Rachel Carson book published in 1968 by MacGibbon & Kee entitled The Sea. The book was a 3-in-1 reprint of The Sea Around Us, Under the Sea-Wind written in 1941 and The Edge of the Sea published in 1955.

Under the Sea-Wind was not a success. It enjoyed excellent reviews but few readers. But then ten years later in 1951 came The Sea Around Us and instant success. Between one spring tide and the next Rachel Carson was world-famous and being showered with honours. The book remained high on the best-seller lists for eighty-six weeks and was translated into thirty languages.

There were two interesting side-effects. Firstly Under the Sea-Wind was reprinted in America and published for the first time in Britain. But for the triumph of The Sea Around Us this remarkable book would have remained gathering dust in the basements of a few American public libraries. Secondly her success brought Rachel Carson the financial independence essential for the research and writing of Silent Spring...and about this book the introduction to The Sea had this to say:

'There can be few literate people who have not heard of Rachel Carson. Her last book Silent Spring sounded a tocsin round the world prompting governments in many countries to restrict the use of pesticides. It has been given to few women, other than the mistresses of emperors and kings, so to influence governments. It has been given to no other woman to do so through the medium of a book.'

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first published in weblog twelve on Thursday 12th January 2006

With the William Franklin weblog postings can happen as and when. The first posting went up a week ago. To make my first weblog interesting I wrapped the message in a little personal piece of theatre about my father: the original William Franklin. Shortly after the first posting I added two more in support my reckless claim: a 5-year record of the Swedish Krona against the Pound Sterling and a 5-year history of the ABB share price. That was Sweden sorted. Today it was Germany’s turn. Posting four was prompted by a piece in the financial press about the sharks circling Scotland & Southern Energy.

William Franklin Posting Five was a remix of an article in the Christmas issue of Rye’s Own. The title of the article was The Politics of Wind Farming. The blog came with a few lines to establish my expert credentials and a piece on Romney Marsh. Energy politics, wind farming and The Little Cheyne Court Wind Farm then made cameo appearances before making way for The Beast of Essen, a giant power and utilities conglomerate that goes by the innocuous-sounding name of RWE and trades under such brand names as Thames Water, Yorkshire Electricity and Npower. The bottom line was to get over to Germany on Thursday 13th April and do some civil disobedience at the Annual General Meeting if you are serious about outflanking the barbarians and stopping them putting up their monstrous towers...each twice as high as Nelson’s Column...on Romney Marsh.

first published in weblog five on Thursday 5th January 2006

I didn’t plan it this way...life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans...but over the next two days I will be driving my daughter’s Peugeot 106 well over a hundred miles. Today I did half of them going in and out of Cardigan twice. And tomorrow’s monthly Carmarthen day will do the rest. All this to-ing and fro-ing will leave me some ten pounds out of pocket. But goodness knows what it will cost the planet. The real planetary burden comes embedded in what Ivan Illich refers to as a structural monopoly. The planet needs a complete energy infrastructure make-over.

Mind you I am a little more optimistic than most about our energy futures. Buckminster Fuller assured me that the world economy went into surplus in the fifties making the classical economics of scarcity of our ruling elites redundant. This was more by luck than judgement. The bottom line is that modern scarcities are man-made. So why not peace crime tribunals to deal with the criminals who create them?

The developed world has been quietly switching from coal to oil to natural gas. The journey from a carbon to a hydrogen economy continues as the car-makers bring out their hydrogen vehicles...see my Energy Wars article. We need energy for three things: heating space, rushing ourselves and our stuff about and winding things up. Space seldom needs to be warmer than one hundred degrees celsius...the first nonsense of the nuclear kettle technology. And electricity demands will be coming down over the next few decades as the world gets smarter at doing more with less...which is the next bit of nuclear nonsense. The $100 wind-up lap-top computer unveiled by Nicholas Negroponte recently is a good example of the trend.

In just half an hour Earth’s very own nuclear reactor ninety three million miles away showers our back gardens with enough power to keep ‘us and ours’ going for a whole year. In the best of all possible energy worlds, grids and cables would be taxed until the pipes squeak and households (not companies) would be paid in local money for any surplus power they could donate to the village or parish pool. As long as the fifty year old technology...formerly known as cheap atomic power...is kept in business by massive public subsidies, the whole energy cost and price structure will be so distorted that it will be well-nigh impossible for a sane, humane, ecological (SHE) energy infrastructure to emerge.

Nuclear fission is a mug’s game and hot fusion is not much better. But don’t get me wrong. The power of atoms and molecules is well worth exploring. But the most promising effects takes place at room temperature. The science of colloids is interesting. Goethe is where it’s at...and Rudolf Steiner was first and foremost a Goethe scholar who spent his formative years pouring over the great man’s scribblings.

Check out The Secret Life of Plants and Secrets of The Soil by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird before dismissing me as a complete nutter. And if you feel really inspired go google your way through searches for scientific papers by the likes of Henri Coanda, Patrick Flanagan, Olof Alexanderson, Alex Podolinsky, Philip Callahan and Ehrenfried Pfeiffer. You could also do worse than download my article Megaliths, Meis & Miners.

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