A Place to Stand

The climate policy of the European Union is now stuck in a dead end. Europe wanted to be the leader – showing the world the way. ....climate summits in Copenhagen and in Cancun were supposed to herald a successor treaty for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012.
But both summits yielded zero results. Today it is clear that there is going to be no successor agreement....

The emerging economies of Asia, especially, are refusing to allow their possibilities for growth to be curbed by obligatory CO2 reductions. Everywhere across the world, climate laws are being buried for good or put on ice.

Treating the EU promotion of global warming alarmism as a way of asserting Europe as the potential global leader and a good way to be rude to the Americans while weighting the Kyoto rules against them has been a failure. And then some. Arguably the greatest failure since the Battle of Adrianople. OK overstatement but I only said "arguably".

The EU used to be the world's largest economic unit with the USA as only competitor and it still is. .But only just and only because American growth has been very poor too and because when warming alarmism started there were no other real competitors. Over the last decade and a half the world economy has grown at 5% annually, China's at 10% and India's, Russia's etc at about 7-9%. That means, by the rule of 70 the world's GNP has double over a decade and a half, China's has quadrupled; the other faster growing countries have tripled  The EU has barely grown if we include the current recession.We tried to lead the world into a dead end and the world has refused to follow.

   This has political consequences. Nobody is going to be persuaded to follow an EU lead for at least a generation. We no longer have the economic clout to pressure anybody. The dominant body is no longer the G7 but the G20, and even more humiliatingly the G20 is not actually made up of the largest 20 economies as the name implies because several countries, which are members of the EU should be included. Presumably it would be even more humiliating to remove them in a few years.

   Which is why China is now in a position to act against the EU's last feeble effort - carbon taxing other countries airlines. Initially by deciding not to buy from Airbus. Whether they buy or not all that this scheme would do would be for Europe to isolate the rest of the world from it (or rather vice versa).

  Whose fault is it that the EU has done this charge of the Light Brigade style folly (another military disaster metaphor but they are apt)? The fault of our Luddite and incompetent political leaders alone, that is whose. Now can we please get rid of these Luddite parasites. I don't even insist on it being fatal.

  An in a neat twist of irony the latest warming alarmist claim is that the reason claimed for the last decades failure to warm catastrophically, ot at all, is blamed on China's industrialisation putting more particulates in the air. Yes the alarmists are saying that China's failure to cut CO2, indeed increasing it markedly, is to blame for the failure of their scare story.

   The government have belatedly noticed that windmills don't work all, or even most of the time. So with a plan to provide 1/3rd of our electricity by windmills (17 gigawatts) they have come up with a back-up plan. Back-up gas generators. As Chris Booker and others report

Centrica and other energy companies last week told DECC that, if Britain is to spend £100 billion on building thousands of wind turbines, it will require the building of 17 new gas-fired power stations simply to provide back-up for all those times when the wind drops and the windmills produce even less power than usual.


We will thus be landed in the ludicrous position of having to spend an additional £10 billion on those 17 dedicated power stations, which will be kept running on "spinning reserve", 24 hours a day, just to make up for the fundamental problem of wind turbines. This is that their power continually fluctuates anywhere between full capacity to zero (where it often stood last winter, when national electricity demand was at a peak). So unless back-up power is instantly available to match any shortfall, the lights will go out.

  These 17 new gigawatt stations will thus be able to produce all the electricity the windmills are supposed to, revealing that it is acknowledged that sometimes the windmills will produce none and are thus a complete waste of the £100 billion (official current price promise) they  cost.


   However lets look further into this. The AP 1000 nuclear plant costs "AP1000 ..... $1000 per KW construction cost and 3 year construction time" (also discussed here) when ordered in volume. $1 bn is £600 million so 17 of them cost exactly the same as the £10 billion worth of gas generators backing up the £100 billion worth of windmills. However the gas generators require large amounts of fuel (gas) which makes up the large majority of costs whereas nuclear fuel is a tiny part of the total cost (most of the cost being satisfying government regulations and levies).

   More proof that 93% of the cost of electricity is political parasitism. Not only are these politicians thus responsible for most of the 25,000 annual deaths from fuel poverty, 2/3rd of electricity use is non-domestic and this is most of why our industries are being driven to China and other relatively honestly governed countries while we remain in recession.

    British "production of electricity was 393 TWh in 2004" but " declined 11 % in 2009 compared to 2004". Since electricity use is closely related to GNP this explains why we are in recession, despite the entirely artificial "growth" of the Labour years based on borrowing on artificially inflated house prices.

    Costs average

we estimate that £500 buys approximately 3382 kWh of electricity with the local supplier

.  which comes to £58 billion. which is 4.1% of GNP. 93% of that is 3.8% of GNP. Remember that nearly 50% of GNP is already officially government spending, which has a net negative effect on national wealth. None of the 3.8% counts as tax though it is all taken from us by government regulation. So even if government spending has "officially " been reduced below the 50% figure in fact it is above it.This is purely money taken from us. It takes no account of the 50% overall reduction in national wealth caused by a variety of government regulations, including the secondary effects of high power costs.

     The good news is that from all this it is obvious that if we drastically cut the amount stolen by government parasites and allowed a free market to allocate resources we would certainly achieve a growth rate matching or more likely considerably exceeding China's 10%.

     I wish there was a member of the Conservative Party who was willing to say that the insistence of their present leadership in continuing the recession, when they know perfectly well how to get out of it, is not only not in the interests of the country but not even in the interests of the party. Better to be out of power, rid of cameron, rid of the LudDims and able to produce worthwhile policiess while letting Useless Ed take the helm for some months.

  China will be a democracy by 2017 because all rich countries are democracies. I replied

He is assuming democracy as being the "end of history" ultimate.


Perhaps a lot of people would prefer a competently run autocracy. Singapore, which is the template for much that has happened in China is a democracy but few ever vote for anybody but the ruling party, which is indeed highly competent and professional.

In the most developed countries we are seeing democracy superseded by a badly run but deeply entrenched bureaucratic state spending around 50% of national wealth and having an obedient media preventing real political debate. This is what we see in the US and to a greater degree in the EU, where only thee trappings of democracy remain.

Given a democratic choice I suspect most Chinese would choose Singapore over the EU. This is the choice that Russian people did make when they, freely and by an overwhelming majority, voted for Putin.

Given a truly free choice and free debate between those 2 options how do you think most Americans or Europeans would vote?

Roger Scruton on why environmental controls are better than the urban sprawl of American cities. I am on the other side but he is a very intelligent man and makes a strong case. Everything, including not being an environmentalist (the real sort not Luddites in stolen clothes) has a cost.

The Guardian's hundred greatest books. Mostly written in the last hundred years. 5 on science, not a single one on economics, 17 biographies and memoirs (2 classifications)(all PC types); Germaine Greer is in Heinlein, Wells, Asimov, anybody like that, is out. So the Guardian is for semi-literates then. No surprise.

Religious end of the world prophecies from 30 to 1920 AD.

Prizes for innovative design

Al Fin on pre-natal testosterone exposure and genius, autism etc. I think they are linked and if the price of more genius is more autism I would happily pay it.

Cool pictures of the world's biggest vehicles


Proposal for an X-Prize for a brain-computer interface. I think this is something that a prize would work for. Such a link would change humanity but it is difficult to see that the team who produced it (I'm sure it would take a team) could charge enough to make them all billionaires, which would be a fair share of the profit.

How the Mississippi flooding is not caused by anthropogenic global warming or Man's inability to control nature (2 mutually incompatible ecofascist claims) but by ecofascist vetos over what the US Army Corps of Engineers is allowed to do to prevent it. On a much smaller scale this is what happened to the English village of Cockermouth - the ecofascists and media prevented the river being dredged and then blamed to inevitable flood on global warming; or the fires and floods in Australia )the Greens vetoed undergrowth clearance and dam building).

Will we ever see another Constitutional Amendment? Not because the Constitution isn't being changed but because all that is required to do it is judicial activism. It took an amendment to ban alcohol, merely a law to ban cannabis and the EPA thinks it can ban carbon dioxide by bureaucratic fiat.

    I did previously mention the possibility, taken from Marshall Savage's book The Millennial Project: Colonising the Galaxy in Eight Easy Steps that we can build floating cities in equatorial water, powered by Ocean Thermal Energy Converters (OTECs) (basically using the heat differential between surface water and the 4 c water below 3,000 ft). A side effect of that is bringing up nutrient rich bottom water which can grow plankton, fish, beef or however far up the food chain you want to go or could do the same to with oil producing algae.

   It is certainly a feasible idea and is being considered

the grand vision of Japan’s Shimizu Corporation goes way beyond harnessing green energy at sea for use in cities on Terra firma – it takes the whole city along for the ride. The company, along with the Super Collaborative Graduate School and Nomura Securities, is researching the technical issues involved in constructing its Green Float concept – a self-sufficient, carbon-negative floating city that would reside in the Equatorial Pacific Ocean.

  And by individuals like John Craven (no not the British one)

it's already won $75 million from Alpha Pacific, a Memphis, Tennessee, venture capital firm, and $1.5 million in federal funds. Craven hopes that within a year, bulldozers will begin clearing land on Saipan and engineers will start sinking a pipe to pump icy water from the ocean depths to produce electricity and freshwater. And back in Kona, Craven expects to use cold-water agriculture to transform five acres of otherwise barren lava fields into the world's most productive vineyard. "The economics are absurd," he boasts. "Once we prove the technology on Saipan, imagine what it could do for places like Haiti!"
Craven's system exploits the dramatic temperature difference between ocean water below 3,000 feet - perpetually just above freezing - and the much warmer water and air above it. That temperature gap can be harnessed to create a nearly unlimited supply of energy. Although the scientific concepts behind cold-water energy have been around for decades, Craven made them real when he founded the state-funded Natural Energy Laboratory of Hawaii in 1974 on Keahole Point, near Kona. Under Craven, the lab developed the process of using cold deep-ocean water and hot surface water to produce electricity. By the 1980s the Natural Energy Lab's demonstration plant was generating net power, the world's first through so-called ocean thermal energy conversion.

"The potential of OTEC is great," says Joseph Huang, a senior scientist for the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration and an expert on the process. "The oceans are the biggest solar collector on Earth, and there's enough energy in them to supply a thousand times the world's needs. If you want to depend on nature, the oceans are the only energy source big enough to tap."

    The main problem with extensive use is the legal position of such floating cities is not defined in international law and investors are understandably unenthusiastic about investing the odd billion in something , no matter how good the investment return, that they may have some problems maintaining ownership of.

    However  this provides some potential for a country that wants to support it. It seems that legally  such a city is either a ship, in which case it is under the protection and authority of the country of registry or that it is a colony and under the protection and authority of the colonising nation.

   Britain has considerable experience of both and is a big enough nation, still, that our flag ownership would be accepted internationally. We also, have experience of being the sovereign of record of small societies and of running them successfully in both the colonial and post colonial world. The Cayman Islands and Bahamas are both British colonies, which provides them with stability and credible financial centres while we know how not to micromanage, something which might make a British floating colony more attractive than a US one for example. Most enthusiastic seasteaders see being free of government as being a major purpose, but the inability to provide legal security is an automatic result of such independence. However few libertarians could hold up the Bahamas as a victim if imperial oppression.

    Indeed the very fact that Britain exists largely offstage has ensured that their politics has not been subject to violence. History does not show that local rulers are always more supportive of freedom than those far away, indeed the opposite could be argued as more common.

    So what would Britain get out of putting floating libertarian seasteads under her imperial wing. Well firstly we could make it a condition of stationary vessels bearing the British flag that they be built in Britain. This would mean, without the £5 billion put into building aircraft carriers, indeed with no government money at all, we would keep shipyards open. That is no small thing. There is also a considerable amount of prestige from having what, if the examples of Singapore and Hong Kong are any basis, are likely to be some of the world's most innovative societies. Perhaps even more form producing, as a byproduct, enough food to feed the world form British territory. Cynocally perhaps even more than that from being the world's primary oil producer. I think it would also be legitimate for the UK to keep some minor tax, perhaps stamp duty (or tea), to be put into paying for the navy. Mark Wadsworth's hobby horse is Land Value Tax - because that tax does not distort the economy because the land supply is fixed. Floating Islands are, not subject to that limitation so perhaps he will be best placed to offer an alternative.

  With each seastead having the right to produce its own constitution we would see social science really becoming something close to an experimental science. That might prove as important to humanity as the ability it would give to feed the world.

     All that is required is passing an Act in Parliament. If the seasteads I predict don't happen then nobody loses. If they do everybody wins. What downside would there be to not passing such an Act apart from the civil service rule that nothing should ever be done for the first time?

A tunnel from Gourock to Dunoon would be a great convenience for people on both sides of the Clyde and bring the Cowal Peninsula into Scotland's central belt. More than that it should be the start of a series of tunnels connecting to Rothsay, Kintyre, Arran and even Jura and Islay.
We know all this would be possible because that and much more has already been done - in Norway, over the last 25 years, they have cut over 900 tunnels with a total length of over 750 km . Many of them are undersea tunnels up to 25 km long. They have cost, on average, no more than £4 million per km.

A 2 lane tunnel between Gourock and Dunoon should cost between £10 and £20 million. This is petty change compared to the £2,300 million the 4 big parties have promised to put into a new Forth Bridge, despite the fact that nothing more than maintenance is required there. Indeed reading the debate on that bridge it is clear that they all expected it to go over budget and were glad that all 4 could present a united front and "attempt at some education to make people understand what we are getting for that level of expenditure"  Theoretically surprising then that when I asked every MSP to explain why the bridge was costing so much only 2 suppoerters answered - one was simply an acknowledgement and promise to give a full answer later, for which I am still waitong. The other, or rather his researcher, produced flannel and refused to give fuller answers when asked.
The great improvement in the road transport system in Norway has been one of the main drivers in it becoming the wealthiest per head of any sizable country in Europe (the second richest is Switzerland, also outside the EU) . This Scottish Tunnel Project would bring all the West Highlands into the Scottish mainstream.

This project has been suggested to all the Holyrood parties, repeatedly over many years, but none of them have shown any interest. None of them have even shown enough interest to give reasons why they are against it. They just are.

 We know it it is possible to cut such tunnels for a tiny fraction of what our political masters demand because it has been done so many times across the world. It is reminiscent of the Edinburgh trams, where if it cost the same as elsewhere in the world it would now be completed for £110 million or the Parliament building where Donald Dewar rejected a fixed price offer of £40 million, solemnly promising that his government would do it, without assistance for that price.
Scotland's whole economy would be enormously improved by a modern transport system making the country accessible. All the effects of the Highland clearances would be reversed. Inverclyde would become a transport centre for the whole, revitalised, far west of Scotland. Gourock to Kintyre would, at under 25 miles, be a quick dual carriageway drive rather than the present hundred miles by 19th century roads.. We know this can be done at a reasonable cost because it has been done worldwide. Scottish engineers have run far more complicated projects than this, worldwide, but they have not had to put up with Scotland's political class to do so.

Even if our political establishment refuse to invest a penny in this, after all they have to continue pouring £1,000 million a year into subsidising windmills, don't they, there is still a way of doing it. Introduce a land capture tax of £10,000 on any new house built across the Clyde in places where land values go up because of new transport links and create an independent publicly owned company who receive that money and can use it to fund tunnel links across the west Highlands & Islands (and ultimately other parts of Scotland) without interference from the politicians. This is a form of PFI and would probably be more expensive over the long term than government just paying for this out of petty cash but can we trust the old parties to do it, speedily, that way?