first published in weblog one hundred and forty four on Wednesday 24th May 2006

It was cold last night. I gave the boat a half-hearted burst of heat for a few minutes in mid-evening but then thought better of it and dug out a sweater. But we had the best of it. In Scotland the Sassenachs shivered through one of the coldest nights recorded for May with temperatures plunging to 25 Fahrenheit at Tulloch Bridge in the Highlands. Clear skies and an Arctic wind produced a freezing snap. We are clearly heading for a New Ice Age.

On 23rd May 1935 Britain was carpeted in snow. Small villages in the Yorkshire Dales were two to three feet deep in snow and villages had to dig themselves out of their homes according to a report in The Times. Cars were abandoned in snowdrifts on roads and trains derailed on frozen railway points. Devon and Cornwall were said to look like a scene from a Christmas card. The bitter cold spelt disaster for fruit and vegetable farmers from South Wales to Kent.

The Times reported a loss of thousands of pounds in Sittingbourne. In desperation one apple grower used thousands of oil lamps to save his crop from freezing. And at the Chelsea Flower Show exhibitors worked frantically to save prize plants using heaters in greenhouses to keep the blooms alive in the bitterly cold nights. With this wasteful and extravagant use of oil no wonder the world is running out. Oil for flowers indeed!

But what does this tell us about the temperature? Snow was falling so it would have been hovering around 32 Fahrenheit. Humidity levels and wind chill factors would have done the rest. A fall in temperature of seven degrees over 71 years is an average drop of 0.0547731 degrees per year. What a disaster. By 2100 temperatures will have fallen by a massive ten degrees. There will be icebergs in the Thames while Londoners mud-skate on the river’s edge.

But there is some good news. There will be no need to tow icebergs from Greenland to solve the capital’s water shortages. Thames Water will be quarrying its own ice and delivering it to the ice houses of the rich and famous in Thames Ditton and Wokingham. But spare a thought for the poor farmer. There are a thousand Sittingbournes in England and there will be thousands of cold spells between now and 2100. With decades of arctic weather, falling sea levels and declining soil fertility the apple orchards will disappear as the farmers throw themselves on the mercy of the bankruptcy courts and their new Debt Orders. There will be massive emigration to Nigeria and the West Indies.

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first published as weblog one hundred and forty two on Monday 22nd May 2006

Media Studies is a standing joke to many...conjuring up images of PhDs in Elvis Presley and studies of the Sociology of Big Brother…not the one from 1984. But occasionally something interesting emerges. What begins as shifting verbal fashions…slang to you…in TV soap operas can lead to investigations of cycles, periodicities, correlation and randomness. From here it is one small step to mental abstractions, ideas, thought…and memes.

Within modern-day cultures ideas rise and fall. For a while everybody believes something and then they stop believing until no one can remember the old idea. In fashion as in natural ecology there are disruptions and sharp revisions of the established order. A lightning fire burns down a forest. A different species springs up in the charred acreage. This happens to science too…the scientific process encourages it. Thomas Kuhn identified the internal mechanisms and structures at work creating these scientific revolutions.

In environmental thought in the 1960s the idea of the balance of nature was widely accepted. Leave nature alone and it will come into a self-maintaining state of balance. The young James Lovelock born in 1926 called it his Gaian Hypothesis but the idea has a longer pedigree…the Ancient Greeks believed it three thousand years ago.

But by the 1990s no scientist believed in the balance of nature anymore. Ecologists spoke of dynamic disequilibrium and multiple equilibrium states. Nature is never in balance, never has been and never will be. Nature is always out of balance. Man…the great disrupter…is nothing of the sort. The environment is being disrupted constantly.

Then one day at the leading edge of Media Studies some American media scientists set their search engines to work analysing the rise and fall of The Idea of Environmental Crisis. Others looked at transcripts of news programmes from the major networks…NBC, ABC, CBS. Others studied stories in the New York, Washington, Miami, Los Angeles and Seattle newspapers. They got their computers to count the frequency of certain concepts and terms used by the media. The results were very striking. There was a major shift towards the end of 1989.

Before that time the media did not make excessive use of terms such as crisis, catastrophe, cataclysm, plague or disaster. For example during the 1980s the word crisis appeared in news reports about as often as the word budget. In addition prior to 1989 adjectives such as dire, unprecedented and dreaded were not common in television reports or newspaper bulletins. But then it all changed. These terms started to become more and more common. The word catastrophe was used five times more often in 1995 than it was in 1985. Its use doubled again by the year 2000.

In 1989 the stories changed too. There was a heightened emphasis on fear, worry, danger, uncertainty and panic. The critical question is why it should have changed in 1989 which seemed like a perfectly normal year. A Soviet sub sank in Norway; Tiananmen Square in China; the Exxon Valdez; Salmon Rushdie sentenced to death; the Episcopal Church hired a female bishop; Poland allowed striking unions; Voyager went to Neptune; a San Francisco earthquake flattened highways; and Russia, the US, France and England all conducted nuclear tests. A year like any other.

But in fact the rise in the use of the term crisis can be located with some precision to the autumn of 1989. And it seemed suspicious that it should have coincided so closely with the fall of the Berlin Wall on the Ninth of November. At first the media scientists dismissed this association as spurious. But it wasn’t. The Berlin Wall marks the collapse of the Soviet Empire…and the end of a Cold War that had lasted for half a century.

For fifty years Western nations had maintained their citizens in a state of perpetual fear. Fear of the Other Side; fear of Nuclear War...the Communist Menace, the Iron Curtain, the Evil Empire. Within the Communist blocs it was the same in reverse…fear of us…but with the heightened fear of personal betrayal and incarceration.

Then suddenly in the fall of 1989 it was all finished…gone, vanished, over. The Fall of the Berlin Wall created a vacuum of fear. Nature abhors a vacuum and the evidence suggests that instead of inventing the moral equivalent of the Cold War as William James would have wished…in the absence of any initiative from the Left…the Right homed in on Environmental Crisis to serve up for global consumption. But there is an irony here.

As far as the Right is concerned the Environmental Crisis has served its purpose. It is beyond its sell-by date. They have moved on and have generated new fears like Islamic Fundamentalism and Al Quaeda Terrorism. But in reality they have created a monster…and they cannot stop their Fear Machine. It is like the Sorceror’s Apprentice. Communist Menaces, Toxic Environments, Wars against Terrorism…it is unstoppable.

But the environmentalists are trapped in their time warp. The momentum of their careers and their funding means that like military generals they are fighting the last war. The thinking right are doubtless much amused. Be our guests, they cry. Fight your old stale environmental wars. We have moved on. We have created new fears and new wars for your distraction. But it’s no fun having the field to ourselves. When will you start to catch up?

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first published in weblog one hundred and thirty eight on Thursday 18th May 2006

I have been reading the Financial Times for the past couple of days to understand the European Carbon Trading Exchange. The newspaper clippings spread out on the cabin table in front of me…I am working on my Dell laptop…have headlines like Blair’s Decision Time On Nuclear Power, Carbon Credit Errors Throw Permit Scheme Into Turmoil, Independent Auditing a Must if Carbon Trading is to be a Success, The Real Story Behind the Collapse of Carbon Prices and Give the Emissions Trading Scheme a Fair Chance...written by the ceo of RWE npower. These shenanigans lend credence to those claiming that the whole point of The Kyoto Treaty is that it should fail.

I don’t believe the Global Warming Orthodoxy that sees Armageddon in carbon emissions. But that is no reason not to eliminate them. The side effects often turn out to be the main effects. It is almost a Rule of Nature. The less muck spewed into the atmosphere the better. But some of the side effects have to be seen to be believed…and many have little to do with cutting back on atmospheric pollution or reining in the emission of greenhouse gases.

My Crap Detector first began to register with the allocation of CO2 emissions permits for 2005…based on self-assessments which made Cod Quotas look like divine justice. The Dirty Half Dozen are Germany with 473 million tonnes, the UK with 242, Italy with 215, Spain with 181, France with 131 and Holland with 81. The other ten countries in the European Commission’s scheme account for just 12% of all permits and can be disregarded.

Demand on the Carbon Trading Exchange is driven by the UK, Spain and Italy …respectively 15%, 11% and 4% over quota. The UK has to buy 40 million tons-worth of CO2 emission permits, Spain 20 and Italy 10. Who has them for sale? Last week it was France and Germany. But then Angela Merkel announced that Germany would give 12 of her 21 million tonnes surplus back to Brussels. But France with her massive ‘non-polluting’ nuclear industry wants to keep her 15 for 2006. Market chaos duly ensued as carbon prices shoot up from €9 to €15 overnight. What a game!

It gets worse. Britain has enforced the toughest cuts on the electricity generators. Here’s the logic. The electricity sector is more insulated from overseas competition than sectors like chemicals, cement and steel so costs can be passed on to customers in higher prices. But the giant German polluter RWE owns Yorkshire Electricity and npower which supply UK consumers. Electricity companies have been accused of profiteering by charging customers for the free carbon permits they were given by Brussels. Now there’s a surprise. You couldn’t make it up.

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first published as weblog one hundred and sixty two on Sunday 11th June 2006

My Curriculum Vitae has an entry for ‘Wheelock College, Boston, USA, 1981-1985’ that reads: 1981 Assistant Professor of Education teaching Organisational Development; 1983 Co-Founder and Tutor-in-Residence of Human Scale Institute on Martha’s Vineyard; 1985 Publication of The Ecology of Learning course for teachers and professional educators’. The summer campus for the Human Scale Institute was at Anna Edey’s Solviva Gardens.

Anna Edey was born and raised in Sweden and moved to the USA in 1957 where she raised three daughters and built herself a career on Martha’s Vineyard dyeing and weaving wool from her own sheep and Angora rabbits before the gods took her under their wings and set her to work weaving a web of life. Here is Anna in Growing Edge Magazine.

‘At four o’clock in the morning on the coldest night of 1984, I am awakened by the howling blizzard. To my utter surprise, inside the greenhouse it’s like a balmy night in June. The thermometer reads 13 Celsius. The Angora rabbits are quietly muffling about in their communal dens. Moon and stars shine brilliantly through the four layers of clear glazing. Here among the tall, lush tomato vines loaded with red sweet tomatoes the thermometer reads 7 degrees. I proceed toward the east end, scooping up deep comforting breaths of humid, mild air fragrant with nasturtium, thyme, sage, dill and living earth. At the far end a hundred chickens acknowledge me with sleepy murmurs, cozy at 21 degrees in their spacious quarters’. The insulation comes from the still air between the layers of glazing.

A greenhouse is a hot and sticky place. Light from the sun is absorbed by the dark plants and partially re-radiated as infrared radiation. Not much escapes because glass blocks radiation at the infrared end of the spectrum. This is the Greenhouse Effect and the Earth is a greenhouse…for dark green plants read the planet’s surface and for the glass read the earth’s atmosphere.

There are two problems with this analogy. The earth’s atmosphere does not behave like glass and although the Amazon Rain Forest may be dark green the polar ice caps are not, much of the planet’s land surface is desert and semi-savannah and almost three quarters of the earth’s surface is ocean. We are told that 99% of the earth’s atmosphere has no insulating properties, that oxygen and nitrogen have no role and that carbon dioxide alone keeps the earth warm enough for life. Why do we allow ourselves to believe this nonsense?

Nuclear power plants generate steam that turns turbines to produce electricity. So the nuclear debate is not a debate about energy needs but about electricity supply. Electricity accounts for 18 per cent of total energy used in the United Kingdom and nuclear power stations contribute 19 per cent of this….falling to 7 per cent by 2020 as reactors are switched off before they get so old that they break apart from corrosion and spew radioactivity into the atmosphere.

So that’s 3.4% falling to 1.3% of the country’s energy requirements. The Channel Tunnel cables can cope. So what’s all the shouting about? My mind has started to have uncharitable thoughts about the perfidious French and the dastardly Germans. They are up to something and Brits are the fall guys. My headline would be Blair Duped Again.

First the Texans and the Israelis take him for a ride over the Iraq Invasion. Now the European Bank is trying to get its two biggest clients off the hook by flogging Blair a dead nuclear horse. Nuclear power is an archaic technology for goodness sake. It’s more than 50 years old. It has no more place in a modern economy than a horse and cart. Blair must go urgently. He is dangerous to our health. This latest love-in could be the death throes of President Blair.

Renewable forms of energy are almost limitless in their potential. They are flexible and offer good security of supply. Nuclear, by contrast, requires uranium to be mined and transported, produces toxic waste and poses a potential terrorist threat. No one has the foggiest idea of the cost of new nukes, new designs will have to be imported…so much for freedom from foreign control of our energy supplies…and the Ministry of Truth will have to control the whole of Government if real economic appraisals of actual past and future reactor costs are to be kept as state secrets.

The real opportunity is not renewable technologies but local energy. All the energy we need for a year arrives in half an hour of sunlight…the rest is complications. Cross-channel cables for Surplus French Nuclear Electricity (SFNE) and a gas pipeline from Norway are all the Energy Insurance this country will be needing. All our national utility grids can be dismantled. The English have no need of them. Over the past 14 years Woking Borough Council has reduced energy demand by 50% and made savings of 77% in carbon emissions through green procurement, basic energy conservation, community use of combined heat and power, biomass, photovoltaics and fuel cells. The Woking Strategy is the way forward. Tackle energy locally…town by town, village by village and parish by parish.

Disregard private interests…the personal and the community sectors are more efficient…when working in tandem locally. Get Energy Supply Pricing right…talk to the Danes…and include utilities in your local tax calculations. The job of central government is to stop private interests getting in the way of local investments and to enable local development strategies by shutting down private utilities…tax them ‘til their pips squeak…and phasing out Whitehall and County Council budgets over a single parliament. This is the Labour Party’s back-to-basics way to renewal.

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