Green Around The Gills

 Saint Greta of Thunberg has been in the news again and she is still happily berating the grown-ups for all the evils of the world. It was a quiet morning at work, so I walked the half-mile to the Co-op Local shop and thought about what I had done. I was appalled at the sheer amount of litter at the roadside. Packaging, takeaway wrappers, indeed quite a lot of once-edible food, and plastic bottles as far as the eye could see.

Quite apart from the obvious eyesore, this speaks to a separation of self from society as people discard things with no consideration for those who will see it, those who will, eventually, pick it up and the very planet everybody now pretends to care so very much for.

We throw away perfectly usable stuff and we carelessly hoard things of little value to us. For example, there is more gold in a tonne of mobile phones than in a tonne of gold-bearing rock, and it is easier to extract, but we cling onto our old phones as the value of recycling is relatively small to us individually. And then, minerals, metals, finished products and other valuable resources are daily committed to the grave of landfill with impunity. We have grown up spoilt, but the fluffy rug of abundant cheap energy has been brusquely whipped from beneath our feet and we have no idea how to keep our balance.

I think about this sort of thing, a lot. I am concerned at the general level of ignorance and incuriosity about our world. What is energy, where does it come from and why does it cost what it costs? Looking out at vast cities, how is it possible that their denizens are fed and watered and cleaned and kept free from disease? What is this thing made from, and how do we know about gravity, time, electromagnetic radiation, the elements, the stars, the universe? And why does humanity keep on coming back to the fictions of deity?

So, when I mischievously tweeted about how one might find the shiny new electric vehicle they have just purchased has become a financial millstone around one’s neck, I was expecting both agreement and disagreement, and this is how it transpired. On the one side, many Tweeters agreed, retweeted or liked my original thread in all its hyperbolic glory. On the other, a relatively small number (mirroring, I expect the relatively small proportion of RV owners out there) bristled at my ignorance and launched full-on rebuttals of all my assertions.

Par for the course, naturally; you are either right or wrong on social media, and sometimes both at the same time. Schrödinger’s opinion. But, for what it’s worth, here is my stance on all things net-zero related:

·       One size, one solution. does not fit all.

·       Is it accessible?

·       Is it affordable?

·       Is it reliable?

·       Does it cost more than it saves?

·       Does it do less environmental harm than what it replaces?

·       Is it wise to replace now, or should I let my current technology run its course?

And what of the future? How will my new life paradigm evolve over the next year, next 10 years, next 50 years? At the moment there are dozens of apparent solutions to the one big problem. In time there will be fewer mainstream technologies and the rest will be in the hands of the eccentric few who can afford to indulge their passions and invest their time and money in novel ways. But it is a fact that the majority of us will have to toe the line; I just want it to be the right line. And right now I don’t think anybody knows where that line will be drawn.

Compromise is the key!

As it stands, going green may well be good, but it is a long way from being cheap and what sways most people is cheap, rather than good. The EV discourse attracted thousands of likes and a good many replies, most of which I tried to address in a placatory tone – I’m not anti-Electric Vehicles, I’m just sceptical about everything – but some respondents showed up with fists clenched. Let’s not make it a fight, eh? But, when it comes to the whole net-zero strategy, let’s all ask the hard questions before we part with our hard-earned.

Lost world (Part 2)

Electric car enthusiasts say low range isn't an issue because most people do less than 80 miles a day. Maybe so, but I do that mileage and currently fill up once a week, or less, which takes me a few minutes. Having to charge every other night might be okay for somebody with a driveway and dedicated charging point, but for others it would mean either parking overnight twice or three times a week and paying for accommodation and charging, or else making two detours every day and taking onboard a ‘fast’ charge, which would still add at least half an hour to each journey. It is just not practicable.

Out there, in the usual online arenas, the word wars rage as converts (usually those who can afford hugely expensive, high spec vehicles and are greatly enamoured of their new prized status symbols) argue with those like me, who worry about the real cost, especially to those who can least afford it yet will have to help subsidise the switch from gallons to kilowatt-hours. Prepare for all your electricity bills to soar. This is a technology which should be left to the market to decide, not be imposed on all by the heavy hand of state.

If the UK government is really serious about tackling our emissions, fixating on one specific sector of energy use is a lazy mistake. Electric cars are sexy, they may be the future, but only for relatively few. (And what of bulk transport; electric 18-wheelers?) A wholesale reform of the way we live and work may be what is actually needed and while transport should be improved, making electric the flagship policy is going to gain few friends. When they also shut off the gas, who do you reckon is going to suffer? (Clue: almost certainly not those who can currently utilise electric cars.)

Once, long ago, in a country which looked entirely different from how it does now, populations bloomed where the industrial seeds had set down roots. Those industries have been offshored to cheaper climes; we get the brown people to make our stuff now. In return we have become a mobile economy which is not better, it really isn’t. Friends and family ties are severed, genuine communities have gone and the rise in personal transport has allowed them to fracture, even as it has given access to work further afield.

But people can’t afford to work where they live, usually because of housing pressures. And they are not easily persuaded to move closer, to end their reliance on personal transport, because jobs are so much less secure than before. Even with a properly integrated, holistic strategy, with assistance to move nearer to work, the encouragement of real careers once again and a decent, clean, efficient and affordable public transport network, there would still be a huge problem in persuading people it was actually safe to travel with strangers.

But we can’t easily put that genie back in the bottle and in the near-to-middle future people will still rely on personal transport. The past fifty years is not a good advert for public transport in the UK and I can scarcely bear to mention HS2…  So where does all of that leave us? How will the switch away from diesel and petrol and gas actually be achieved and will the stated gains of that policy ever be realised as our energy needs continue to rise; are we simply barking up the wrong tree?

We could totally shut down our entire energy consumption and huddle together for warmth and it would make sod-all material difference to the planet. UK Carbon emissions really are the least of our worries. Whatever we do, Mother Nature will be hale and hearty long after our species has ceased to dominate the planet. Charity begins at home, they say and maybe we should get parochial about this. We should be looking at ways to lessen the impact on ourselves and adapt to any change in climate, not trying to arrest a change that nobody fully understands in the first place.

But that isn’t sexy enough for this brave new world, is it? So expect further changes to be announced, expect energy policies to be edited on the hoof with every crackpot theorist given funding and recognition and every dissenter berated for their heresy. Expect money to be thrown at pet projects and the cost heaped on those unable to adopt the latest fad. Maybe this is the real thinking behind the west’s sudden obsession with climate change – give the plebs so much to worry about, so much to fear, that they will be grateful for the few freedoms they get to keep.

Lost world (Part 1)

If you are a fan of global conspiracies – and I know many of you are – you could do worse than to plump for one literally involving the entire planet in its evil designs for total control of all humanity. Except that’s all bollocks. What is undeniable, however, is that the world’s leaders have succumbed to an unprecedented level of groupthink as a result of the coalescence of science, mumbo-jumbo and fear which has risen from those same huddled masses you think are being controlled; if anything this is the other way round. I blame education.

Since the 1960s a low grade cultural Marxism has slowly taken hold and people power has resulted in many changes in our societies. A great many of them are for good, undoubtedly; the power of the crowd given a free vote has inevitably forced the kind of advances that probably would never have occurred to a ruling class who were not dependent on popularity. But the crowd isn’t always right and the crowd rarely joins the dots, with the result that unintended consequences often remain unforeseen until it is too late.

You want clean air for your kiddies to breathe? Of course you do. You want to save the planet from the spectre of catastrophic climate change? Who wouldn’t? The logical conclusion of all these leading questions is that climate change is publicly undeniably: bad, our fault, can be reversed… and can only be challenged by drastic action, no matter what other alternatives (such as adapting to climate change) are available. Something must be done, says the mob. Fuck me, say governments, as a result of which…

2035 is just the blink of an eye away. The UK government has gone deep with its pander-to-Saint-Greta strategy banning new petrol and diesel car sales in just 15 years. But to what end? If the UK ceased to exist, if it was obliterated entirely from the map, the world CO₂ emissions would reduce by less than 1% and all the experts, insofar as anybody can be an expert in something as ill-defined as ‘climate science’ agree that this would make no difference whatsoever to whatever they are predicting today (prophecies vary).

But this isn’t what the UK is proposing to do. The Road to Zero moniker suggests that we will have a zero-carbon transport infrastructure in just a few decades, but this is nonsense. Even if the entire fleet was converted to electric we still generate plenty of CO₂ emissions in the extraction of materials, transportation across oceans, manufacture and infrastructure implementation. Plus we still have to somehow generate the electricity to run this new miracle fleet which will, inevitably, have to use fossil fuels well into the next century.

Electric cars are powered by coal

At best we might reduce our overall carbon footprint for vehicles by about 20% and even then only by hiding it somewhere else. And at what cost? A quarter of a century ago the world of science said diesel was the answer, and not so long back hybrids were the key. Now both will be on the scrapheap. No more research and development, so no improvements and notwithstanding the VW debacle over the cheated emissions controls, small diesel engines were getting better and better all the time. That alone might have resulted in a similar reduction in footprint but those potential advances are now lost.

Instead the population faces a massive upheaval, not to mention massive cost. At a time when the new government could have got to grips with tackling the root causes of mass discontent within our society it has decided, instead, to embark on a vainglorious vanity project. Instead of doing the thing it was elected to do, it is trying to leap onto the world podium before the race has even been run. They used to say look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves. That holds true for individuals, for communities, for governments and for the entire world. We should be jealously guarding our resources, Mr Prime Minister, not spaffing them up the wall in a pointless pissing contest.

To be continued…

Do Little

The UN Climate Summit recently concluded, having been moved from Chile to Madrid and then being extended. Thousands of air miles consumed and lots of CO₂-laden hot air spouted and not one single conclusive outcome. No actions, no decisions and almost nothing agreed, thus, no point. In fact it is doubtful whether the carbon cost of the futile exercise itself will ever be offset. I mean, just how many trees do you need to plant to cancel out the inanity of coming up with a ‘gender action plan’ which ‘recognises the impact of climate change on human rights, historic and current gender inequalities and the importance of intersectionality’?

These leaders, these experts, these braying donkeys tell themselves they are engaged in saving the planet for all humanity. Instead they are gathering some of its wealth for themselves and some favoured others. This is what climate action does. It creates a problem, funds research to describe the problem, lays the blame at the feet of the people who can do least about the problem, then attracts more funding to arrange junkets where rent-seeking buffoons can pat each other on the back and say they are fixing the problem. Well, they’re not.

This isn’t about whether or not - or how far - you trust the current thinking on climate change. Or whether anybody – and I mean, literally, anybody – has the full information at their command, let alone at their fingertips. For every doomsday prophecy about how a single centimetre sea-level rise will kill a billion people, there are a dozen contrary conclusions available. Hell you can’t even find out how much an offshore wind turbine costs throughout its life, or how much your bills and taxes have increased to pay for it, or whether, as has been reported, the short-term effect on climate change is actually negative.

And by short term I’m talking about the first one hundredyears. Yes, you heard me. Much of the technology isn’t sufficiently mature and the infrastructure needed to support such an energy paradigm shift is decades away. As a result, although a probable majority would agree to pay to ameliorate the worst effects of humanity on the planet, it is difficult if not impossible for anybody to be totally honest about it. Portents of mass extinction are overblown and hysterical, but hardly less problematic are the knee-jerk reactions of governments impotent to act rationally yet all too ready to act irrationally, as long as they are seen to be acting. But, for pity’s sake, governments, give people an incentive, don’t take the stick to them.

Electric cars for instance. I’m going on a charging point installers’ course tomorrow, as it happens, but I don’t expect to be either enlightened or enthused. Far from offering a revenue stream for jobbing electricians, this is just another way of selling blankets and shovels to the prospectors. The installation opportunities have already been monopolised by big money concerns and the little man won’t get a look in. Why am I going? Well, I am also a seller of shovels and blankets and my company will be offering courses in the new year; this is just a bit of small-scale industrial espionage.

Yes, I am part of the problem too, but, you see, humans are opportunists and if we don’t provide the training, somebody else will, as unnecessary as it will all turn out to be. Electric cars are not only not the solution, they don’t even come close to providing a solution. I expect them to prove to be a huge white elephant. Only this morning I heard somebody pronounce that all oil-fuelled vehicles must be off the road by 2030. To do this will involve a massive re-organisation of our entire society, the costs of which will fall – as always and in every way – on those least able to absorb them.

The solution – the solutions – lie not in governments doing a lot, but everybody doing a little. Instead of waiting for subsidies to persuade you to change, how about a bit of self-reliance for once? You want an electric car? Buy an electric car, for the full price. You want to reduce CO₂ from flying? Forget about the ridiculous notions of ‘carbon trading’ just, you know, don’t fly. As for the rest of us, a little bit of tighter budgeting, a reduction in waste and a less thoughtless lifestyle might be all it needs to make a real difference.  If only we could get the Chinese to do the same...

Going Extinct

The Extinction Rebellion mass hysteria has certainly worked on some. People have been obstructed from going about their innocent, non-planet threatening business, children have been frightened out of their wits, police have been shown to be toothless and politicians have lost no time in jumping on the bandwagon. Even those of us who are mocking from the sidelines have been drawn into the ‘debate’ by their antics; everybody is now talking about it.

And one of the things they are talking about is the coming age of the electric car. I tweeted several weeks ago that I have never actually seen an electric vehicle charging point in the flesh and was greeted with incredulity. But it’s not so hard to explain. I live in a small village and I work 40 miles away. I can’t charge at home (no off-road parking), I can’t charge at work and I have to go out of my way to find a garage. I rarely travel outside of that pattern and I never fill up at motorway services. I repeat, I have never seen an EVCP in real life.

This doesn’t make me a bad person. But, judging by the callers to Nick Ferrari’s LBC programme this morning, maybe it does. In the wake of James Dyson’s decision to abandon his own electric car project, a segment of the show was given over to the shining disciples of the new dawn. I don’t think there was a single dissenter and even those for whom, like me, a supercharged milk float is impractical, expressed regret that they could not take advantage of this energy revolution.

Electric is clean, electric is free (for some), electric is a miracle and electric will save the planet. How dare Dyson bow to economic considerations rather than join the gold rush? But that’s the thing, isn’t it? Just like wind energy, the advantages are loud-hailered to the world, but the downsides, the hidden costs and the aggressive subsidies are given rather more subdued coverage. Subsidies? Yes, if you currently use a plug-in electric vehicle everybody else is subsidising your travel; somebody always has to foot the bill.

But Dyson is right, it should be considered in the round. For all the Tesla supercars out there, which are really just virtue-signalling status symbols, the all-electric transport system is still a long way off. For the vast majority of drivers – those who live in terraced houses, in council flats, in those odd, low-rise fifties developments where you have to park dozens of yards from your front door – plug-in charging is an impossible dream. And where is all this extra electricity coming from, especially when electricity generation is one of the activities at which the environmentalists’ fingers most vigorously wag?

But don’t worry, procrastinate, because some members of Extinction Rebellion claim that 90% of the human population will have died out in just two generations. That’s probably how much time it would have taken to properly develop the infrastructure for us to go all-electric. On this basis Dyson’s decision would appear to be economically sage. What’s the point of spending all that investment if the market isn’t going to be there when it comes to fruition? Thank you, XR for defeating your own argument.

It's Electric!

I had an electric car once. The range was pathetic... the cord only stretched about 50 feet. An oldie but nevertheless still illustrative of a truism, that although electric cars may be the future, it will be a future quite different from the one advertised. There may yet be inductive charging while in motion, kerbside hook-ups every fifteen feet and the opportunity for some to charge up for free at work, but the electricity has to be reliably generated somewhere.

And about that reliability thing: until we get 24/7 sunshine, or constant, not-too-weak/not-too-strong wind we have to generate that electricity by, you guessed it, fossil fuel, because much of the world has turned against nuclear. So, the real power behind electric cars is not clean, fresh, free-to-harvest renewables, but good old coal and gas. Add in the cost of mining all that toxic cadmium and other expensive, exotic metals and it is almost certain you can show that cough for cough, electric cars are more environmentally harmful than diesel

But long before we get to the stage when environmentalists begin to campaign against electric cars we need to spend a whole bunch of cash just to make electron-propelled transport viable. Where do you live and where do you work? Do you have a nice driveway where you can recharge? Or, like far more of the population, do you need to park across the road, in the next street, or just in a different spot every evening because, muh, congestion?

Who is going to build all the power stations needed? It has been widely reported that China builds a new coal-fired power station about every three seconds, yet in the UK we get one new nuclear plant every fifty years. And how is all that electricity to be distributed; who is going to build the infrastructure? You guessed it, not us. The Germans and the French already seem to own our power market anyway, so hey, let’s throw more of our capital away in pursuit of what still seems, to me, to be an improbable dream.

Why the push for all-electric transport then? Well, obviously it is whatever form of climate change we are trying to reverse this week. And if energy usage is the bogeyman, why increase it? Turning fossil fuel into motive power, heat, light, etc is more effective if you cut out the middle man of costly (to build, maintain, manage and bill for) energy networks which merely increase complexity. This introduces efficiency losses at each stage of the process: extraction, transport, conversion , distribution, etc  and adds administrative costs as the bureaucracy of the systems involved each take their slice.

Drax power station in South Yorkshire converted to the ‘carbon neutral’ wonder fuel known as biomass some years ago. Not only is this more expensive, but it is ultimately more polluting, especially when you take into account the supply chains and deforestation involved in the base fuel. Drax is built pretty much on top of a massive source of coal, which it used to burn. If the Chinese and the Germans are allowed to get away with coal-fired, why do we have to pay for what they produce from afar when we have it right here?

Faced with rising costs, British consumers of electricity have been economising and their adoption of more efficient devices, low energy lighting and a bit of common sense is paying dividends. The electric car might be a shiny carrot of a pseudo-incentive, but we have always responded quicker to a beating and the big stick of electricity tariffs has been pushing our usage down for years. It was reported this morning (BBC World Service news) that we are now using less electricity in the UK than in the eighties and that our thrift has been more influential in this than the combined ‘contribution’ of both wind and solar power.

Plug into a nearby taxpayer's wallet and she's ready to go... 

So, the experts’ solution to our future energy needs is to increase our demand for electricity? And to do this they will add extra taxes into your electricity bills? Doesn’t this sound rather like the sort of things a drug baron might do - increase dependency, push up the price? Are those in control really a part of the solution at all, or rather the largest part of the problem? By all means buy an electric runabout today, but suggest your kids look into coal, oil and gas for future careers... just in case.

Electrickery

So, the future is bright; the future is electric? The government announcement that by 2040 the petrolhead will be dead has garnered much comment over the last 24 hours, much of it based, quite rightly, on who is going to pay for it all. Well, who do you think? The government has no money of its own so this is yet another pesky green scheme whose targets will quietly be pushed further into the future and whose benefits may turn out to be minimal.

Nebulously linking that long-ago discredited 40,000 premature deaths to the use of fossil fuels for transport is just another project fear tactic. If you really want people to switch you need to pay them, not punish them. Introducing punitive taxation to now reverse previous government policy is showing too much of the stick and far too little carrot. With oil and gas more plentiful and thus cheaper than it has been for a long time, surely the shorter term answer is to continue to develop emission control.

But research into making safer oil-fuelled engines will stall if there is no future in it; the new gold rush will be battery technology and all the eggs will go into the single precarious basket of an all-electric world. I have no objection to electricity; indeed, I make my living from it. What bothers me is how ready those who lead us are to purchase new clothes for the emperor, without regard for the crowds who have to watch him parade in them.

Where, for a start, is all the ‘leccy’ going to come from? What if I don’t have a driveway and have to park my car on the roadside a hundred metres from where I live; how do I charge up? I can fill my tank in five minutes; what will the queues be like at the charging stations of the future? And will fast-charging affect battery life? Talking of battery life, there are studies that suggest the lifetime environmental cost of battery power may actually be more harmful than doing what we currently do. Has this been properly investigated before policies have been formulated? I very much doubt it.

Nobody knows the future, but we have survived the past; the devil we know. The taxes raised by selling petrol and diesel and by levying a road fund licence will vanish, so how will the government recoup lost revenues? Charging for road use, via traffic-strangling toll collection? Or by mileage, in which case how will this be monitored; trackers in every vehicle? Will our cars become part of the Internet of Things and if so with what consequences for individual liberty?

And sooner or later, you can guarantee it, somebody is going to claim that electric cars give you cancer. With more electricity around there will be more electromagnetic radiation. With more use of rare elements in batteries, more people will come into contact with materials never normally encountered before. What of those who make the batteries; what of those who dispose of them? Has anybody even thought of this?

No doubt all these obstacles and more will arise and be surmounted, but in just 23 years? That seems like a lifetime – in fact it is - if you are in the 18-24 group who will uncritically applaud this apparently planet-saving move. But in infrastructure spending terms this could put HS2 in the shade and that’s been hovering about for decades already and still nobody knows what, if any, real economic benefits it may bring. Are you sure you are ready to pay for all this, kids? Until I can see a saving, I’m sticking to diesel.