RealClimate reviews a 1981 attempt to forecast the climate impact of CO2 emissions, and finds that it's basically pretty good (see also The Register eating their words slowly). Which is what you'd expect - the physical processes involved aren't that complicated at that sort of low-earth orbit viewpoint, and the only things that could really go wrong would be some sort of huge data collection problem or else a really big volcano.
That was James Hansen's work, and this week he got an Easter egg! Rather, the US Environmental Protection Agency issued a draft regulation that basically means you can't build a new coal-fired power station. This may be the best news anyone's had for some time.
Showing posts with label energy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label energy. Show all posts
Sunday, April 08, 2012
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Failure of a lobby
Sherwood Rowland, one of the scientists responsible for discovering that CFCs were destroying the ozone layer and fixing the problem, has died. Realclimate has a good write-up, as does Eli Rabett, who makes the excellent point that we needed to invent quite a bit of the chemistry involved before we could discover there was a problem. Perhaps more telling is this NASA web page, which describes the output from the Goddard Space Flight Centre's Chemistry-Climate Model given inputs corresponding to a world that kept using the stuff. It's either utterly terrifying, or enormously inspiring, depending on how you look at it. Rowland, Paul Crutzen, the British Antarctic Survey people who did the fieldwork...they essentially saved the world.
But what really interests me was how they got the Vienna and Montreal protocols passed. I had the vague impression that something had changed since 1989, that the ex-tobacco industry unscience industry was only cranked up later to bash the climatologists. In fact, I'm wrong. A comment at Realclimate points out that they were indeed targeted by the usual suspects. Rowland was accused of being a KGB agent trying to destroy capitalism.
Jeff Masters of Wunderground has a really handy rundown of the pushback campaign against the ozone scientists, who were subjected to direct smears as above, plus a barrage of general-purposes PR, psuedo-scientific doubt-mongering, all with the assistance of Hill & Knowlton, Tom DeLay (for it is he) and (interestingly) some of the same characters who turn up both in Big Baccy and later on in the climate wars.
But here's the interesting question, though. In the case of CFCs, it didn't work. Thatcher's late swing towards environmental issues is fairly well known, and prime ministers are certain of ratifying treaties they sign. Something must have induced Reagan to sign and Congress to ratify, though. Did the CFC makers just not give it one more heave, a few more millions?
But what really interests me was how they got the Vienna and Montreal protocols passed. I had the vague impression that something had changed since 1989, that the ex-tobacco industry unscience industry was only cranked up later to bash the climatologists. In fact, I'm wrong. A comment at Realclimate points out that they were indeed targeted by the usual suspects. Rowland was accused of being a KGB agent trying to destroy capitalism.
Jeff Masters of Wunderground has a really handy rundown of the pushback campaign against the ozone scientists, who were subjected to direct smears as above, plus a barrage of general-purposes PR, psuedo-scientific doubt-mongering, all with the assistance of Hill & Knowlton, Tom DeLay (for it is he) and (interestingly) some of the same characters who turn up both in Big Baccy and later on in the climate wars.
But here's the interesting question, though. In the case of CFCs, it didn't work. Thatcher's late swing towards environmental issues is fairly well known, and prime ministers are certain of ratifying treaties they sign. Something must have induced Reagan to sign and Congress to ratify, though. Did the CFC makers just not give it one more heave, a few more millions?
Saturday, June 18, 2011
the 1980s considered as a battle in the air war over Germany
Thinking about my last post brought one of the ideas in this one to mind, especially given today's front page. That is, was the miners' strike a strategic bombing campaign?
You what? But consider the strategy the NUM adopted. The basic idea was to concentrate on the supply of coal to the steel industry - hence the battle of Orgreave. The point of this was to force British Steel, as it then was, to idle production. That would, they hoped, cause the steel managers and the downstream industries that consumed steel to put pressure on the government to settle. It might even bring out the steelworkers on strike.
The other option was to concentrate on the other big coal consumer, the electricity industry. Power cuts would hit the economy generally, and would hit consumers directly, unlike cuts in supply to the steelworks.
An important difference between the two was that much of the steel industry's coal was delivered as coke, whereas the power stations received coal directly from the mines. (Other differences included the fact that the power sector had more options and that power cuts might have unfavourable political consequences because they affected the public directly.) This created a number of critical network nodes between the coal and steel industries. The NUM hoped to target these and therefore send the crisis cascading through the downstream industries until the adversary cracked and gave in or the population rioted and got rid of them.
This really is very close to the whole package of airpower theory, or for that matter John Robb's global guerrillas concept. As readers will be aware, I'm sceptical of both. Anyway, why didn't it work?
Arguably, the big problem with this as a strategy was that the government didn't actually care about what happened to the downstream industries. For the government, even the maximum degree of trouble the miners could inflict on the steelmaking and metalworking economy was a price they were willing to pay.
A question to the reader: What is it that the Tories value most?
You what? But consider the strategy the NUM adopted. The basic idea was to concentrate on the supply of coal to the steel industry - hence the battle of Orgreave. The point of this was to force British Steel, as it then was, to idle production. That would, they hoped, cause the steel managers and the downstream industries that consumed steel to put pressure on the government to settle. It might even bring out the steelworkers on strike.
The other option was to concentrate on the other big coal consumer, the electricity industry. Power cuts would hit the economy generally, and would hit consumers directly, unlike cuts in supply to the steelworks.
An important difference between the two was that much of the steel industry's coal was delivered as coke, whereas the power stations received coal directly from the mines. (Other differences included the fact that the power sector had more options and that power cuts might have unfavourable political consequences because they affected the public directly.) This created a number of critical network nodes between the coal and steel industries. The NUM hoped to target these and therefore send the crisis cascading through the downstream industries until the adversary cracked and gave in or the population rioted and got rid of them.
This really is very close to the whole package of airpower theory, or for that matter John Robb's global guerrillas concept. As readers will be aware, I'm sceptical of both. Anyway, why didn't it work?
Arguably, the big problem with this as a strategy was that the government didn't actually care about what happened to the downstream industries. For the government, even the maximum degree of trouble the miners could inflict on the steelmaking and metalworking economy was a price they were willing to pay.
A question to the reader: What is it that the Tories value most?
MGIs for cleaner skies, and Power Tool of the Week
Swinging off a discussion at Jamie Kenny's of climate deniers, I wonder what Jamie thinks about Steve Levine's thesis here that China's emerging culture of mass protest, the famous Mass-Group Incidents or MGIs, may have major and positive consequences for Chinese energy policy and therefore for the world.
It's surely time we started calling the MGIs a movement; they are big, they are angry, they are common and increasingly so. Also, they seem to be getting more simultaneous as well as more frequent. The range of issues involved is enormous, from pay to police violence via public corruption and land appropriation. And they're effective - the Chinese Communist Party, although it has more than enough brute force to crush them, often seems to semi-tolerate mass protests by trimming policy or sacking discredited officials. I've suggested before that the top level of the Party may actually see them as a useful force in disciplining the industrial bosses and territorial proconsuls who rule below it. The emperor may be far and the mountains may be high, but that's the last thing you want when an enraged mob is trying to burn down the Public Security Bureau offices.
Beyond that, it's conventional to say that the Party wants stability above all and that the organising principle of Chinese politics is Hobbesian fear of chaos. JK would probably point out that they're damn right - if you had China's history, you'd be obsessed by chaos because there's been so much of it and it was so fucking chaotic. Anyway, Jamie is the blogosphere's MGI expert and therefore I'd like his opinion.
Levine's argument is that forecasts of China's economic and energy future tend to arrive at an enormous and prolonged boom in coal-fired generation. They do this by projecting current rates of growth into the future. This scares the shit out of everyone with any sense, as it's this huge, epochal belch of CO2 (and a lot of other stuff besides) that will eventually fuck us all up. Of course, if the CAGRs for coal consumption were wrong quite a few assumptions would need to be reviewed.
Levine argues that it's the other stuff you get with coal, especially the low grade brown coal China uses a lot of, that will intervene. Basically, he reckons, air pollution, power-plant development, and mining will become a major and rising source of serious MGIs and will result in the Party restraining the coal industry before the mob does it for them. L
Levine points out that Chinese interests were quite restrained during last year's rush of coal-related mergers and acquisitions - which is interesting when you think that if the Party wanted them to, they could bid almost without limit thanks to SAFE's enormous foreign exchange reserves.
Further, and I seem to remember James Hansen making this point, there are real constraints on how much coal the Chinese economy can get through, in that moving that much coal from mines and ports to power stations will fairly soon use up most of the State Railways' freight capacity. As most of this coal is going to drive the machine tools in all those export processing factories...well, either the bulk haul trainload of coal moves or the intermodal linertrain of containers of exports moves. Are you feeling lucky, punk? Building a completely new railway is of course the sort of thing that gets people in an MGI mood.
From a technocratic perspective, as Joe Romm explains here, restrictions on all the other stuff coal-fired power stations shit into the atmosphere are basically as good as a ban on them.
The question is therefore whether "green MGIs" are a serious possibility. It's not actually necessary that the MGIs be specifically about what Greenpeace would call a green issue, of course. Rioting over pay or safety down the mines, over ethnic resentment in the coalfields, or over land appropriation for new power stations or railway lines would do as well. But it's worth noting that environmental protests happened in the 1980s in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and acted as a sort of gateway drug to dissidence more broadly. Not that people who are willing to burn down the police headquarters and run the mayor out of town when they feel their interests are insufficiently recognised need one.
Relatedly, and also via LeVine, meet the Unitec Model 5 pneumatic hacksaw, guaranteed by the manufacturer to slice through a 24" pipeline in one blow and only 16lbs dead weight to tote away from the scene of the crime. And it's nothing but good American workmanship, too. Mesh wireless is so pre-Iraq by comparison, don't you think?
It's surely time we started calling the MGIs a movement; they are big, they are angry, they are common and increasingly so. Also, they seem to be getting more simultaneous as well as more frequent. The range of issues involved is enormous, from pay to police violence via public corruption and land appropriation. And they're effective - the Chinese Communist Party, although it has more than enough brute force to crush them, often seems to semi-tolerate mass protests by trimming policy or sacking discredited officials. I've suggested before that the top level of the Party may actually see them as a useful force in disciplining the industrial bosses and territorial proconsuls who rule below it. The emperor may be far and the mountains may be high, but that's the last thing you want when an enraged mob is trying to burn down the Public Security Bureau offices.
Beyond that, it's conventional to say that the Party wants stability above all and that the organising principle of Chinese politics is Hobbesian fear of chaos. JK would probably point out that they're damn right - if you had China's history, you'd be obsessed by chaos because there's been so much of it and it was so fucking chaotic. Anyway, Jamie is the blogosphere's MGI expert and therefore I'd like his opinion.
Levine's argument is that forecasts of China's economic and energy future tend to arrive at an enormous and prolonged boom in coal-fired generation. They do this by projecting current rates of growth into the future. This scares the shit out of everyone with any sense, as it's this huge, epochal belch of CO2 (and a lot of other stuff besides) that will eventually fuck us all up. Of course, if the CAGRs for coal consumption were wrong quite a few assumptions would need to be reviewed.
Levine argues that it's the other stuff you get with coal, especially the low grade brown coal China uses a lot of, that will intervene. Basically, he reckons, air pollution, power-plant development, and mining will become a major and rising source of serious MGIs and will result in the Party restraining the coal industry before the mob does it for them. L
Levine points out that Chinese interests were quite restrained during last year's rush of coal-related mergers and acquisitions - which is interesting when you think that if the Party wanted them to, they could bid almost without limit thanks to SAFE's enormous foreign exchange reserves.
Further, and I seem to remember James Hansen making this point, there are real constraints on how much coal the Chinese economy can get through, in that moving that much coal from mines and ports to power stations will fairly soon use up most of the State Railways' freight capacity. As most of this coal is going to drive the machine tools in all those export processing factories...well, either the bulk haul trainload of coal moves or the intermodal linertrain of containers of exports moves. Are you feeling lucky, punk? Building a completely new railway is of course the sort of thing that gets people in an MGI mood.
From a technocratic perspective, as Joe Romm explains here, restrictions on all the other stuff coal-fired power stations shit into the atmosphere are basically as good as a ban on them.
The question is therefore whether "green MGIs" are a serious possibility. It's not actually necessary that the MGIs be specifically about what Greenpeace would call a green issue, of course. Rioting over pay or safety down the mines, over ethnic resentment in the coalfields, or over land appropriation for new power stations or railway lines would do as well. But it's worth noting that environmental protests happened in the 1980s in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union and acted as a sort of gateway drug to dissidence more broadly. Not that people who are willing to burn down the police headquarters and run the mayor out of town when they feel their interests are insufficiently recognised need one.
Relatedly, and also via LeVine, meet the Unitec Model 5 pneumatic hacksaw, guaranteed by the manufacturer to slice through a 24" pipeline in one blow and only 16lbs dead weight to tote away from the scene of the crime. And it's nothing but good American workmanship, too. Mesh wireless is so pre-Iraq by comparison, don't you think?
Sunday, November 14, 2010
local news: power cuts
We keep having power cuts. In eight days, we had three, all of them between 5.30am and 6am, which all lasted most of the morning. I know exactly when they happen, because the smoke alarms start beeping and wake me up. My partner claims she was warmer on a demo than she was in the flat during no.2. As they seem to follow a pattern of happening at the same time every other day - just about when power demand starts to turn back up in earnest - I was wide awake at 0545 today waiting for the plaintive beeps. But no - looking at the chart, the ramp-up is later on a Sunday. Mind you, later in the day the lights flickered repeatedly for half a minute.
So I rang up UK Power Networks' (what used to be EDF Energy Networks, what used to be the London Electricity Board) press office and announced myself as a blogger. And the lights immediately went out...no, actually, they issued the following statement.
Can it indeed. Let's hope they don't end up needing to do one of these.
So I rang up UK Power Networks' (what used to be EDF Energy Networks, what used to be the London Electricity Board) press office and announced myself as a blogger. And the lights immediately went out...no, actually, they issued the following statement.
UK Power Networks would like to apologise to some customers in the
Holloway Road area of London who have experienced a series of power interruptions over recent weeks.
In the latest incident, power was interrupted to 327 customers at 5.54am today and restored to all customers affected by 11.20am.
The cause of the problem is believed to be an intermittent fault on an underground cable which our engineers are currently trying to trace. This can happen when the heat generated within the cable seals the damaged section, making it difficult to trace
Can it indeed. Let's hope they don't end up needing to do one of these.
Sunday, June 27, 2010
pessimism+optimism = future
Pessimism: if we keep burning the coal, eventually keeping warm will be the least of our worries. Where's your discount rate now, Timmeh?
Stupidity: can we get out of this Bruce Sterling novel now please?
Blame: it's Coalistan vs. Everyone Else.
Logistics: China can't lay railway track fast enough to move as much coal as they would want to burn if they don't clean up.
Science: energy use drops spectacularly once density goes over 50 people+jobs/hectare.
Schadenfreude: the Murdoch Times retracts its IPCC-bashing. Detail; the text agreed with Prof. Simon Lewis was then mangled to fit with the Party Line.
More schadenfreude: Steve McIntyre hits peak readership and enters inevitable decline.
Optimism: Exponential growth curves cut both ways, dammit. If the wind and solar people keep it up, in 2027 they'll be in charge. Prepare now for the Danish future.
More optimism: I remember when this used to be in books about the FUTURE.
Stupidity: can we get out of this Bruce Sterling novel now please?
Blame: it's Coalistan vs. Everyone Else.
Logistics: China can't lay railway track fast enough to move as much coal as they would want to burn if they don't clean up.
Science: energy use drops spectacularly once density goes over 50 people+jobs/hectare.
Schadenfreude: the Murdoch Times retracts its IPCC-bashing. Detail; the text agreed with Prof. Simon Lewis was then mangled to fit with the Party Line.
More schadenfreude: Steve McIntyre hits peak readership and enters inevitable decline.
Optimism: Exponential growth curves cut both ways, dammit. If the wind and solar people keep it up, in 2027 they'll be in charge. Prepare now for the Danish future.
More optimism: I remember when this used to be in books about the FUTURE.
Sunday, May 02, 2010
it's called "power" for a reason
This story from Rajiv Chandrasekharan about two rival approaches to sorting out Kandahar's electricity supply is informative, but not just about its apparent topic. Basically, the US Army wants to go for a quick fix, installing a lot of mobile generators and trucking in the diesel fuel, in order to get the lights on as soon as possible. The US civilians in Afghanistan disagree, on the grounds that it's a temporary hack that will be far too expensive for the Afghans to support in the longer run.
Incredibly, it turns out, the US/NATO base at Kandahar air field produces and consumes about 100 megawatts of electricity; the estimate for the gap between current levels and requirements is 42 megawatts. Obviously, the military has a point in that if it's possible to produce that much electricity in the field, it may be foolish to keep playing around with grandiose projects when a call to Aggreko could cut it.
On the other hand, as in Iraq, electricity is deeply political. We speak of generating power for a reason.
Deploying 42MW of mobile diesel gensets to Kandahar is one kind of solution; it defines the issue as a discrete project, which can be solved by standard logistics methods, drawing on a private contracting firm that specialises in delivering surprisingly large electricity projects in containerised form. It also commits whoever rules in Kandahar to import large quantities of diesel through the shaky logistics pipeline from Pakistan, which means that somebody has to find the foreign exchange to back the most expensive way possible of generating power, and keep the roads reasonably open, which has its own military and political consequences.
You could argue that it's not actually a solution - in fact, it's a substitute for a solution, a temporary, containerised fix delivered as part of a standard tool-kit for counterinsurgency. A lot of people would argue that there is no such thing. Certainly, though, this option implies that donors continue to pay the bills, somebody continues to patrol the roads, and someone continues to pay off the Taliban between there and Quetta. I can't help thinking, looking at a lot of the growing technology of instant urbanism (suitcase GSM base stations, palletised VSATs, Aggreko gensets, Sun Microsystems containerised data centres...) that a lot of this stuff might actually be a sort of negative toolkit of local optimisations. I'm trying to be optimistic, though; a less depressing example is here, in which South Sudan gets its own brewery. (I never realised producing beer was so bulk-increasing that it was worth importing all the inputs except for labour.)
On the other hand, the US civilians' alternative is to press on with the Kajaki Dam project; the British Army brought off an incredibly complex tour de force in finally getting its new turbines delivered, involving a major operational-level deception plan, the building of a new road, and 4,000 men, but it's still not making much progress. Adam Curtis would probably have something interesting to say about the fact that it's been the major development plan for southern Afghanistan since the 1950s. The reason is, of course, that it embodied a particular political vision.
In terms of what might be called conflict urbanism (see this post) the Kajaki dam would seem to be a really bad idea; the plan is to generate power out in Taliban territory and have Kandahar depend on that. We know how well long-distance transmission lines survive in an environment of insurgency and counterinsurgency from Iraq; not at all. Of course, given that something like 40% of the power goes missing in transit, this is itself a sort of suboptimal political solution on the part of the people who live near the wires.
By comparison, generating power in town and having it radiate out to the villages is obviously a very different kind of politics - the conceptual fit with the counterinsurgents' intellectual legacy is quite clear. However, I can't help but doubt that anyone's going to be importing all this diesel into Kandahar in two years' time, nor that Aggreko or whoever's expat staff will be entirely cool with a stint there. Of course, the problem is deeper than that; the contractors' war-risk insurance policies come to mind.
The bill is apparently a cool $200 million; at $4/watt, a 42MW concentrating solar power plant would come in at $168m and produce power independently.
But I suspect this is as likely to happen as the other way of getting enough foreign exchange for Kandahar to buy its own fuel is to be accepted. Another notable fact is that the US Army is looking at getting the GCC countries to pay for the diesel bill - entrenching, in other words, southern Afghanistan in the Saudi sphere of influence.
Incredibly, it turns out, the US/NATO base at Kandahar air field produces and consumes about 100 megawatts of electricity; the estimate for the gap between current levels and requirements is 42 megawatts. Obviously, the military has a point in that if it's possible to produce that much electricity in the field, it may be foolish to keep playing around with grandiose projects when a call to Aggreko could cut it.
On the other hand, as in Iraq, electricity is deeply political. We speak of generating power for a reason.
Deploying 42MW of mobile diesel gensets to Kandahar is one kind of solution; it defines the issue as a discrete project, which can be solved by standard logistics methods, drawing on a private contracting firm that specialises in delivering surprisingly large electricity projects in containerised form. It also commits whoever rules in Kandahar to import large quantities of diesel through the shaky logistics pipeline from Pakistan, which means that somebody has to find the foreign exchange to back the most expensive way possible of generating power, and keep the roads reasonably open, which has its own military and political consequences.
You could argue that it's not actually a solution - in fact, it's a substitute for a solution, a temporary, containerised fix delivered as part of a standard tool-kit for counterinsurgency. A lot of people would argue that there is no such thing. Certainly, though, this option implies that donors continue to pay the bills, somebody continues to patrol the roads, and someone continues to pay off the Taliban between there and Quetta. I can't help thinking, looking at a lot of the growing technology of instant urbanism (suitcase GSM base stations, palletised VSATs, Aggreko gensets, Sun Microsystems containerised data centres...) that a lot of this stuff might actually be a sort of negative toolkit of local optimisations. I'm trying to be optimistic, though; a less depressing example is here, in which South Sudan gets its own brewery. (I never realised producing beer was so bulk-increasing that it was worth importing all the inputs except for labour.)
On the other hand, the US civilians' alternative is to press on with the Kajaki Dam project; the British Army brought off an incredibly complex tour de force in finally getting its new turbines delivered, involving a major operational-level deception plan, the building of a new road, and 4,000 men, but it's still not making much progress. Adam Curtis would probably have something interesting to say about the fact that it's been the major development plan for southern Afghanistan since the 1950s. The reason is, of course, that it embodied a particular political vision.
In terms of what might be called conflict urbanism (see this post) the Kajaki dam would seem to be a really bad idea; the plan is to generate power out in Taliban territory and have Kandahar depend on that. We know how well long-distance transmission lines survive in an environment of insurgency and counterinsurgency from Iraq; not at all. Of course, given that something like 40% of the power goes missing in transit, this is itself a sort of suboptimal political solution on the part of the people who live near the wires.
By comparison, generating power in town and having it radiate out to the villages is obviously a very different kind of politics - the conceptual fit with the counterinsurgents' intellectual legacy is quite clear. However, I can't help but doubt that anyone's going to be importing all this diesel into Kandahar in two years' time, nor that Aggreko or whoever's expat staff will be entirely cool with a stint there. Of course, the problem is deeper than that; the contractors' war-risk insurance policies come to mind.
The bill is apparently a cool $200 million; at $4/watt, a 42MW concentrating solar power plant would come in at $168m and produce power independently.
But I suspect this is as likely to happen as the other way of getting enough foreign exchange for Kandahar to buy its own fuel is to be accepted. Another notable fact is that the US Army is looking at getting the GCC countries to pay for the diesel bill - entrenching, in other words, southern Afghanistan in the Saudi sphere of influence.
Sunday, November 15, 2009
a reminder that things happen quickly
If you think the Superfreaks had demonstrated the truth of the Dunning-Kruger effect well enough, especially after this further hammering, and their attempt to gain everyone's esteem by having NewsCorp send out copyright nastygrams, think again.
Here's some science, via Lou Grinzo's blog. We've been taking very, very thin samples of the leafmould in the bottom of a rather special Irish lake (peat - not much oxygen, so things *last*), and it's possible to draw some interesting conclusions about the Younger Dryas event, which flipped the planet into an ice age 13,000 years ago after a huge ice barrier in North America collapsed and let vast amounts of fresh water pour into the Atlantic.
The killer detail, literally: the new ice age kicked off within months. We had thought it took decades, but instead it tore in within a year. A year. No time to adjust; not even that much time to flee.
This should surely kill off any daft ideas of fiddling with the atmosphere. Shouldn't it?
Here's some science, via Lou Grinzo's blog. We've been taking very, very thin samples of the leafmould in the bottom of a rather special Irish lake (peat - not much oxygen, so things *last*), and it's possible to draw some interesting conclusions about the Younger Dryas event, which flipped the planet into an ice age 13,000 years ago after a huge ice barrier in North America collapsed and let vast amounts of fresh water pour into the Atlantic.
The killer detail, literally: the new ice age kicked off within months. We had thought it took decades, but instead it tore in within a year. A year. No time to adjust; not even that much time to flee.
This should surely kill off any daft ideas of fiddling with the atmosphere. Shouldn't it?
Thursday, September 03, 2009
No Future in the Cath Kidston Favela
I have some problems with "10:10", the latest timebound big media campaign. The first one is symbols and aesthetics. They are handing out tags made of aluminium alloy cut out of a retired B737 down at Hurn. This is meant to be recycling, and wonderfully symbolic.
No. A superbly engineered artefact has been reduced to trinkets that will very likely go into landfill. Couldn't they have made the bits into wind turbine blades, or solar stoves, or bicycle frames if you must, or even just wiggly tin roofing? Or something, at least? Instead, it's a poster example of what Bill McKibben calls "downcycling". And, of course, it's the wrong bloody problem anyway; we could shut down aviation tomorrow and not meet the 10:10 goal, but lose fast international travel anywhere but a smallish chunk of Western Europe.
Another example; the climate campers apparently held a course on running a 12v power supply for a sound system, driven by someone pedalling. Well...engineering FAIL. If the only possible source of power is pedalling a bloody bike, wouldn't it be better to keep the bike and the calories for transport? Would a stereo be a high priority then? Wouldn't it be better to use the wind, the water, or the fire with a Sterling engine? In context, solar PV would be way out of the question. (I was pretty impressed by the edit your own sousveillance vids one, though.)
Not so sure about content, either. The Guardian is of course a biased source here; but they only found one person who wanted to build anything. An architect, of course. The front page coverage made me want to give up and buy a huge car; here's blonde Daisy, 16 and mugging for 14, suggesting we "grow veg on the balcony". Darling. Couldn't they have found Keisha-Tigrette from Tottenham who wants to KILL OIL IN THE EAR? I think they probably couldn't, and we'll get to that later.
As with most British media green pushes, there's little sign of any interest in anything physical or lasting. Not an inch of rockwool. Everything is about changing your behaviour, and specifically micro-behaviour - what you buy, or turning off lights, not how you work or where you live or how society works. Worse, it's a demand for entirely free-floating behavioural change - nobody seems to be suggesting any way of monitoring or measuring the change, or any incentives. This isn't going to work. And, again, it's all consumer guff.
The problem with consumer guff is that it's a limited way of approaching the problem. It's arguable whether or not investment is the defining value in the macro-economy - it's pretty clear that it's crucial to the climate/energy position. It is defined by the stuff we build. And further, without any mechanism to keep up to it, nothing is more evanescent than promises to do better. It doesn't even take backsliding to break them; what if you lose your job, and have to move somewhere where you need to commute 40 miles to work? Alas poor 10% saved by being nicer.
It's tough, however, to suck insulation out of the walls; this is one of the reasons I'm keen on retrofits as an alternative to winter fuel payments. The Tories can't take them away once they're done.
My third problem is this: where is the optimism? Everyone's talking about demog-friendly nostalgia for rationing that the demographic in question doesn't remember. That's not a sacrifice; woodbines, box at the Empire, sixpence, yadda yadda. Nobody is saying: Let's do BETTER this time. Let's build something BIGGER and SHINY and DRAMATIC and FANTASTIC and OUTRAGEOUS that doesn't just meet a 10% target but SMASHES it.
Where is the future in all this? What kind of a future is it? How are we meant to be full of confidence and aggression without it?
Actually there are some other options, chiefly RAGE and HATRED. No sign of them, either; but identifying an enemy is the oldest motivator in the book. There's no sign of a stinking mob hunting British Gas fatcats or an army of Rosie the Riveters basting Vladimir Putin like a turkey with their sealant guns. Why the hell not? We have enemies - why not make the most of them. I bet Keisha would be delighted to have King Abdullah and the CEO of Exxon burned in effigy, or perhaps just burned...after the block gets superinsulated.
Unfortunately, we're relying on self-righteousness as the driving emotion; not optimism (shorthand: lust), not greed, not rage, not hatred. Mind you, it is clearly an infinitely renewable resource, just like stupidity.
And while I'm on the point, where are the workers in this? Who's monitoring what exactly the council, or the diddly-dee semi-privatised thingy organisation, does when they refurbish the estate? Does anyone care about the "fuel poor" if they can't offer them a cash handout just before the elections?
There is, actually, a powerful response to some of this. That is: 10:10 looks a bit like a vacuous PR stunt because it's a PR stunt. The aim is to influence the deliberatiwoos in Copenhagen. Superistical. Das ist gut so. But this done, treaty signed, etc, we've got to go implement. With the North Sea gas running down, we've got to do that quicksmart anyway.
So, you ask, where are my positive proposals? The D-word? Well, I'm interested to hear what anyone else thinks about a campaign for an answer to climate and energy issues that points forward, that leans left, and that isn't based on whose-kid-are-you media bullshit. I'm planning to squirt sealant into every corner of my own place before this winter, too.
No. A superbly engineered artefact has been reduced to trinkets that will very likely go into landfill. Couldn't they have made the bits into wind turbine blades, or solar stoves, or bicycle frames if you must, or even just wiggly tin roofing? Or something, at least? Instead, it's a poster example of what Bill McKibben calls "downcycling". And, of course, it's the wrong bloody problem anyway; we could shut down aviation tomorrow and not meet the 10:10 goal, but lose fast international travel anywhere but a smallish chunk of Western Europe.
Another example; the climate campers apparently held a course on running a 12v power supply for a sound system, driven by someone pedalling. Well...engineering FAIL. If the only possible source of power is pedalling a bloody bike, wouldn't it be better to keep the bike and the calories for transport? Would a stereo be a high priority then? Wouldn't it be better to use the wind, the water, or the fire with a Sterling engine? In context, solar PV would be way out of the question. (I was pretty impressed by the edit your own sousveillance vids one, though.)
Not so sure about content, either. The Guardian is of course a biased source here; but they only found one person who wanted to build anything. An architect, of course. The front page coverage made me want to give up and buy a huge car; here's blonde Daisy, 16 and mugging for 14, suggesting we "grow veg on the balcony". Darling. Couldn't they have found Keisha-Tigrette from Tottenham who wants to KILL OIL IN THE EAR? I think they probably couldn't, and we'll get to that later.
As with most British media green pushes, there's little sign of any interest in anything physical or lasting. Not an inch of rockwool. Everything is about changing your behaviour, and specifically micro-behaviour - what you buy, or turning off lights, not how you work or where you live or how society works. Worse, it's a demand for entirely free-floating behavioural change - nobody seems to be suggesting any way of monitoring or measuring the change, or any incentives. This isn't going to work. And, again, it's all consumer guff.
The problem with consumer guff is that it's a limited way of approaching the problem. It's arguable whether or not investment is the defining value in the macro-economy - it's pretty clear that it's crucial to the climate/energy position. It is defined by the stuff we build. And further, without any mechanism to keep up to it, nothing is more evanescent than promises to do better. It doesn't even take backsliding to break them; what if you lose your job, and have to move somewhere where you need to commute 40 miles to work? Alas poor 10% saved by being nicer.
It's tough, however, to suck insulation out of the walls; this is one of the reasons I'm keen on retrofits as an alternative to winter fuel payments. The Tories can't take them away once they're done.
My third problem is this: where is the optimism? Everyone's talking about demog-friendly nostalgia for rationing that the demographic in question doesn't remember. That's not a sacrifice; woodbines, box at the Empire, sixpence, yadda yadda. Nobody is saying: Let's do BETTER this time. Let's build something BIGGER and SHINY and DRAMATIC and FANTASTIC and OUTRAGEOUS that doesn't just meet a 10% target but SMASHES it.
Where is the future in all this? What kind of a future is it? How are we meant to be full of confidence and aggression without it?
Actually there are some other options, chiefly RAGE and HATRED. No sign of them, either; but identifying an enemy is the oldest motivator in the book. There's no sign of a stinking mob hunting British Gas fatcats or an army of Rosie the Riveters basting Vladimir Putin like a turkey with their sealant guns. Why the hell not? We have enemies - why not make the most of them. I bet Keisha would be delighted to have King Abdullah and the CEO of Exxon burned in effigy, or perhaps just burned...after the block gets superinsulated.
Unfortunately, we're relying on self-righteousness as the driving emotion; not optimism (shorthand: lust), not greed, not rage, not hatred. Mind you, it is clearly an infinitely renewable resource, just like stupidity.
And while I'm on the point, where are the workers in this? Who's monitoring what exactly the council, or the diddly-dee semi-privatised thingy organisation, does when they refurbish the estate? Does anyone care about the "fuel poor" if they can't offer them a cash handout just before the elections?
There is, actually, a powerful response to some of this. That is: 10:10 looks a bit like a vacuous PR stunt because it's a PR stunt. The aim is to influence the deliberatiwoos in Copenhagen. Superistical. Das ist gut so. But this done, treaty signed, etc, we've got to go implement. With the North Sea gas running down, we've got to do that quicksmart anyway.
So, you ask, where are my positive proposals? The D-word? Well, I'm interested to hear what anyone else thinks about a campaign for an answer to climate and energy issues that points forward, that leans left, and that isn't based on whose-kid-are-you media bullshit. I'm planning to squirt sealant into every corner of my own place before this winter, too.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
tatty
Brilliant post from Dan Lockton on the design problems of making smart meters usable and useful.
In a sense, it relates to this post at the RSA's Social Brain about "the dark side of "nudge""; of course, the downside of all these neat ideas about adjusting people's decision processes into ones that are more rational, or at least less harmful, isn't a sinisterly hyperefficient world where all troublesome individuality has been, blah, blah, but instead a world of undermaintained, malfunctioning good intentions.
In science-fiction terms, rather than a space-opera dystopia, it's a New Wave one we've got to watch; all greasy handrails, important safety devices rigged to stop them making a noise, and infinite reserves of bitterness and resentment. From Dan's scenario-planning:
In a sense, it relates to this post at the RSA's Social Brain about "the dark side of "nudge""; of course, the downside of all these neat ideas about adjusting people's decision processes into ones that are more rational, or at least less harmful, isn't a sinisterly hyperefficient world where all troublesome individuality has been, blah, blah, but instead a world of undermaintained, malfunctioning good intentions.
In science-fiction terms, rather than a space-opera dystopia, it's a New Wave one we've got to watch; all greasy handrails, important safety devices rigged to stop them making a noise, and infinite reserves of bitterness and resentment. From Dan's scenario-planning:
The display is still there on the fridge door, but when the batteries powering the display run out, and it goes blank, no-one notices.Quite; like the indefinitely deferred maintenance that tends to kill modern buildings. In fact, what that snippet reminded me of was democracy.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
target for tonight...
OK, time to make the rubble bounce. There's a nice online visualiser for climate data here, (thanks!) so we can have a lovely little chart.
OK, this shows the GISTEMP land-ocean mean for as long as they've been measuring, as the red line. As you can see, that sucker's going up. As you can also see, the variance is considerable - it bounces about quite a lot. The green line shows the trend. Over on the left, I've plotted trendlines starting 1998, dark blue, and 1999, purple.
As you can see, the hot year 1998 makes the trend look flatter over the next ten years - but it's still upwards, because this is a trend estimate, not just a line drawn from one end of the plot to the other. The computer wouldn't do anything that dishonest. But just to illustrate it, I've added a trend plot from 1992 to 2006, in light blue. Scary, huh? Going up like a rocket.
Of course it is; because it's completely meaningless. I selected those dates because 1992 was an unusual cold year caused by a volcanic eruption and 2006 was hot, which is no different to picking 1998 as a start point because it was hot.
If you do what Duff did, and forget that it is now 2009, as you can see from the chart, the trend in the last ten years would be going up FASTER than the trend across the whole dataset.
Someone arguing in good faith would have immediately dropped their sublime confidence at 0001Z 01/01/09 and started buying inland property, bullets, and toilet paper, to say nothing of apologising to the world at large.
OK, this shows the GISTEMP land-ocean mean for as long as they've been measuring, as the red line. As you can see, that sucker's going up. As you can also see, the variance is considerable - it bounces about quite a lot. The green line shows the trend. Over on the left, I've plotted trendlines starting 1998, dark blue, and 1999, purple.
As you can see, the hot year 1998 makes the trend look flatter over the next ten years - but it's still upwards, because this is a trend estimate, not just a line drawn from one end of the plot to the other. The computer wouldn't do anything that dishonest. But just to illustrate it, I've added a trend plot from 1992 to 2006, in light blue. Scary, huh? Going up like a rocket.
Of course it is; because it's completely meaningless. I selected those dates because 1992 was an unusual cold year caused by a volcanic eruption and 2006 was hot, which is no different to picking 1998 as a start point because it was hot.
If you do what Duff did, and forget that it is now 2009, as you can see from the chart, the trend in the last ten years would be going up FASTER than the trend across the whole dataset.
Someone arguing in good faith would have immediately dropped their sublime confidence at 0001Z 01/01/09 and started buying inland property, bullets, and toilet paper, to say nothing of apologising to the world at large.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
Climate change denier redefines the number 10
A magic moment in the history of troll; it may never come again.
OK, so you know the climate-change denier talking point about global warming supposedly "stopping" in the last ten years. It's a classic example of how to lie with numbers; you just choose the bit of the data series that suits you and forget the rest. 1998 was really hot, so you start the chart there, and presto, a flat or declining trend. Learn about it here. Of course, the facts that it was rising steadily before '98 and has been rising steadily since then, and that the best evidence that something isn't rising is not that there has been an all-time high value recently are ignored.
Now, well, 1998 isn't ten years ago any more. So, I was wondering if any of the trolls would be sighted claiming that global warming has stopped in the last ten years, now their own talking point doesn't make sense even on its own terms. Enter David "no-one could be better named" Duff with a genuinely duff performance.
But for our purposes, look at the chart here; if you start measuring 10 years ago from today, in 1999, you get a warming trend of almost 0.4 degrees C, about four times greater than the linear regression would give you! DOOOMED I tell you!
Quite an achievement; you'd think that repeating talking points was within anyone's abilities, but we've found a troll who can even bollocks that up. FAIL.
OK, so you know the climate-change denier talking point about global warming supposedly "stopping" in the last ten years. It's a classic example of how to lie with numbers; you just choose the bit of the data series that suits you and forget the rest. 1998 was really hot, so you start the chart there, and presto, a flat or declining trend. Learn about it here. Of course, the facts that it was rising steadily before '98 and has been rising steadily since then, and that the best evidence that something isn't rising is not that there has been an all-time high value recently are ignored.
Now, well, 1998 isn't ten years ago any more. So, I was wondering if any of the trolls would be sighted claiming that global warming has stopped in the last ten years, now their own talking point doesn't make sense even on its own terms. Enter David "no-one could be better named" Duff with a genuinely duff performance.
Incidentally, ‘Little Willy’, what’s happened to all that global warming in the last 10 years? No, on second thoughts don’t bother replying to that, your written equivalent of the clicks and grunts of a Kalahari bushman is simply too, too, tedious.Oh, mate, that's your Prime Directive ("Don't be such an arse about it") violated right there, with a good dollop of racism chucked in.
But for our purposes, look at the chart here; if you start measuring 10 years ago from today, in 1999, you get a warming trend of almost 0.4 degrees C, about four times greater than the linear regression would give you! DOOOMED I tell you!
Quite an achievement; you'd think that repeating talking points was within anyone's abilities, but we've found a troll who can even bollocks that up. FAIL.
Wednesday, June 03, 2009
giant symbol crashes and overturns, killing billions of dollars
You thought the Hummer being put on the block was symbolism? This is symbolism: the bloated, militaristic, fuel-guzzling cultural trope itself is being sold to Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery. Yes; an unheralded outfit from the deep west, not even Shenzhen or Shanghai. Seeing as its core business is making construction gear, tankers, and off-road vehicles, it may even return to being something roughly designed for a purpose.
It's probably worth mentioning that the Humvee, in its post-2004 up-armoured version, and its later, baroque replacements, get singled out in David Kilcullen's Accidental Guerrilla. Specifically:
It's probably worth mentioning that the Humvee, in its post-2004 up-armoured version, and its later, baroque replacements, get singled out in David Kilcullen's Accidental Guerrilla. Specifically:
As Steve pointed out, this is truly an urban submarine - we drive around in an armoured box with three-inch thick windows, peering out through our portholes at the little Iraqi fish swimming by. They can't see us, and we don't seem human to them. We are aliens, imperial stormtroopers with our Darth Vader sunglasses and grotesque and cowardly body armour. The insurgents have done to us what we said they would do to them - isolated us from the population...An artefact is an ideology made manifest; the caricature America we've known since the 1980s could hardly be better illustrated, whether outwards in its violent and paradoxically vulnerable military sense or inwards in its lumbering, debt-bloated, hyper-capitalist civilianised sense. Both of which relied upon the engine technology of the 1950s.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
a question of demand
Great post of Dan Lockton's about what demand for energy actually is. Amory Lovins' remark that no-one wants "energy", they want cold beer, is of course another version of this. Which, once it had got together with this story about financing solar installation and marinated nicely in my del.icio.us queue for a while, made me wonder what kind of an organisation you would need to have the incentives set up to supply less energy.
A buyers' co-op sounds good; after all, power from the grid and the gas network would be purely a cost to it. But it's more complicated than that; you'd want it to have an incentive to put cold in the beer, whilst also having one to minimise its use of (nonrenewable) energy. And it's hard to imagine how you'd go about operationalising this. It's a micro-version of the issues in this post about the intersection of CO2 taxes and international trade.
It's a difficult problem, especially if you consider the possible surveillance costs. For example, you could assess a subscription based on your usage at joining, and then return whatever gain the co-op made over the wholesale price of power as a dividend; but this would have a huge free-rider problem.
A buyers' co-op sounds good; after all, power from the grid and the gas network would be purely a cost to it. But it's more complicated than that; you'd want it to have an incentive to put cold in the beer, whilst also having one to minimise its use of (nonrenewable) energy. And it's hard to imagine how you'd go about operationalising this. It's a micro-version of the issues in this post about the intersection of CO2 taxes and international trade.
It's a difficult problem, especially if you consider the possible surveillance costs. For example, you could assess a subscription based on your usage at joining, and then return whatever gain the co-op made over the wholesale price of power as a dividend; but this would have a huge free-rider problem.
Sunday, May 10, 2009
IP over Mud
Remember cows with blogs? Sure ya do. This week I was talking M2M technology again, but with people who are way more hardcore about it than Scottish farmers wanting to give their cows RSS feeds, or even wind turbine engineers wanting to monitor the state of their bearings and power-control electronics. Putting control logic on the seabed is problematic, but putting it at the end of a drill, thousands of feet below it, at silly temperatures?
That's science fiction, but the scary bit was the communications question. You can't really do anything like that with radio, so they modulate the flow of drilling mud up to the surface to squeeze out a few bits/second of bandwidth. Seriously - it's called mud-pulse telemetry. Of course, as you can only hope for 3 or so bits a second at the depths in question, this is why the control logic needs to be down at the drill and largely automatic.
We are, of course, talking oil here, and specifically the ultra-deepwater stuff BG Group has hacked out a speciality in. What struck me is that people constantly talk of the supposed complexity and difficulty of utilising renewable energy, and they tend to assume that oil is simple to extract. Intelligent drills and mud-pulse telemetry to you.
That's science fiction, but the scary bit was the communications question. You can't really do anything like that with radio, so they modulate the flow of drilling mud up to the surface to squeeze out a few bits/second of bandwidth. Seriously - it's called mud-pulse telemetry. Of course, as you can only hope for 3 or so bits a second at the depths in question, this is why the control logic needs to be down at the drill and largely automatic.
We are, of course, talking oil here, and specifically the ultra-deepwater stuff BG Group has hacked out a speciality in. What struck me is that people constantly talk of the supposed complexity and difficulty of utilising renewable energy, and they tend to assume that oil is simple to extract. Intelligent drills and mud-pulse telemetry to you.
Sunday, March 08, 2009
alternative Yorkshire
25 years; the strike was the first political event, indeed one of the first events, I actually remember. At least I remember power cuts and TV news broadcasts with the number of weeks the miners had been out counting up. After that, I recall Chernobyl - they set up a radiation monitor in the car park and my mother was interviewed on TV in front of it - and Gorbachev (we had a photo of him, complete with birthmark!), and then, it all starts rolling past.
Years later I actually met Scargill, at a conference of economics students; it was some testimony to his oratory that he was cheered to the echo by an audience that included about fifty per cent Young Conservatives. Perhaps it was the other fifty per cent. The organisers certainly aimed for stimulation - the other keynote speakers were John Redwood and Patrick Minford, of all people. Around the same time I met my first Scargill-hater, who actually was an ex-miner. History is like that.
Here is the man himself's version. I don't know the detailed history well enough to criticise it, although it strikes me that his idea of cutting off the coal supply to the steel industry, a sort of John Robb-ish cascade-failure attack, was based on a fundamentally false assumption. Namely, it assumed Thatcher cared what happened to the steelworks; as we now know, she was just as keen to screw them as she was the miners, and not much better with regard to the downstream steel-consuming industries either.
But one thing I don't think anyone has mentioned about this is that whatever had happened in 1984, there could only ever have been a stay of execution for ten years. In 1995, the starting gun for serious climate fear was fired when the IPCC scenarios crossed the 95% confidence interval into significance; and as James Hansen says, it's the coal. Essentially lumps of carbon, with some added toxic heavy metals for laughs, and there's so much of the stuff that we won't run out before we cook the planet.
Consider the alternate history for a moment; NACODS walk out as well, the government is forced to give in. Thatcher, of course, doesn't quit, but there is either a 1922 Committee coup or else she loses the 1987 election, or perhaps there is a repeat of 1974 - she calls an election for a mandate to take on the miners again, and loses. Neil Kinnock walks into Downing Street, either in a Labour government or a coalition with the Liberals and SDP.
Where do we go from here? The TUC-driven European turn in the Labour Party hasn't happened yet, but neither has the D-Mark shadowing and ERM fiasco. The Labour Party has taken a goodly dose of the new social movements, as in the original time-line, but the prestige of the NUM on the Left would be immense.
But whatever happens in the Kinnock-Steel government, at some point in 1995 the Chief Scientific Advisor walks into the Cabinet Room, and about ten minutes later, all hell breaks loose. After all, in this scenario we've been merrily burning much more coal than in the original timeline for the last ten years, and the coal lobby is the strength of the Left.
The political implications would be more than weird. The activist Left, all other things being equal, is heavily green-influenced, so it ends up against the miners. The mainstream Labour Party is wildly conflicted. And the rightwing science-dodger ecosystem has no choice but to support the miners; Anthony Browne and friends in Doncaster, probably with bags of Exxon-provided cash. Thrill as they try to tack between screwing the government and keeping their North Sea investments.
So the strike 2.0 happens in the late 90s/early 2000s, with mobile phones and the Internet on the protesters' side (flashmobs at Ferrybridge), tasers and pervasive CCTV on the police side, and all the party affiliations surreally flipped. God knows how that would have played out.
Someone ought to write the book.
One thing this brings up is just how necessary social democracy is; sometimes, it's not enough to be right, and huge impersonal forces are going to work their will, like the steadily rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And then, it's up to the society we create around ourselves whether the changes that will happen will be humane or brutal and tragic.
Years later I actually met Scargill, at a conference of economics students; it was some testimony to his oratory that he was cheered to the echo by an audience that included about fifty per cent Young Conservatives. Perhaps it was the other fifty per cent. The organisers certainly aimed for stimulation - the other keynote speakers were John Redwood and Patrick Minford, of all people. Around the same time I met my first Scargill-hater, who actually was an ex-miner. History is like that.
Here is the man himself's version. I don't know the detailed history well enough to criticise it, although it strikes me that his idea of cutting off the coal supply to the steel industry, a sort of John Robb-ish cascade-failure attack, was based on a fundamentally false assumption. Namely, it assumed Thatcher cared what happened to the steelworks; as we now know, she was just as keen to screw them as she was the miners, and not much better with regard to the downstream steel-consuming industries either.
But one thing I don't think anyone has mentioned about this is that whatever had happened in 1984, there could only ever have been a stay of execution for ten years. In 1995, the starting gun for serious climate fear was fired when the IPCC scenarios crossed the 95% confidence interval into significance; and as James Hansen says, it's the coal. Essentially lumps of carbon, with some added toxic heavy metals for laughs, and there's so much of the stuff that we won't run out before we cook the planet.
Consider the alternate history for a moment; NACODS walk out as well, the government is forced to give in. Thatcher, of course, doesn't quit, but there is either a 1922 Committee coup or else she loses the 1987 election, or perhaps there is a repeat of 1974 - she calls an election for a mandate to take on the miners again, and loses. Neil Kinnock walks into Downing Street, either in a Labour government or a coalition with the Liberals and SDP.
Where do we go from here? The TUC-driven European turn in the Labour Party hasn't happened yet, but neither has the D-Mark shadowing and ERM fiasco. The Labour Party has taken a goodly dose of the new social movements, as in the original time-line, but the prestige of the NUM on the Left would be immense.
But whatever happens in the Kinnock-Steel government, at some point in 1995 the Chief Scientific Advisor walks into the Cabinet Room, and about ten minutes later, all hell breaks loose. After all, in this scenario we've been merrily burning much more coal than in the original timeline for the last ten years, and the coal lobby is the strength of the Left.
The political implications would be more than weird. The activist Left, all other things being equal, is heavily green-influenced, so it ends up against the miners. The mainstream Labour Party is wildly conflicted. And the rightwing science-dodger ecosystem has no choice but to support the miners; Anthony Browne and friends in Doncaster, probably with bags of Exxon-provided cash. Thrill as they try to tack between screwing the government and keeping their North Sea investments.
So the strike 2.0 happens in the late 90s/early 2000s, with mobile phones and the Internet on the protesters' side (flashmobs at Ferrybridge), tasers and pervasive CCTV on the police side, and all the party affiliations surreally flipped. God knows how that would have played out.
Someone ought to write the book.
One thing this brings up is just how necessary social democracy is; sometimes, it's not enough to be right, and huge impersonal forces are going to work their will, like the steadily rising concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. And then, it's up to the society we create around ourselves whether the changes that will happen will be humane or brutal and tragic.
Sunday, December 21, 2008
premature optimisation, the root of all sins
James Wimberley has a good post regarding changing the electricity grid to support dynamic demand-response, where things like Dutch cold-stores or your fridge over-cool when electricity is plentiful and cut out when the grid is under strain. It's hugely important in adapting the electrical system to use stuff like gigawatt-size wind farms; essentially, it's a way to store large volumes of electricity, with the added feature that you lose no power in the process. Not using the power is always 100 per cent efficient.
Anything that lets you buck entropy has to be good, but there are some serious problems to get over. James dislikes some versions of this as being too Stalinist - the grid reliability controller reaches out and turns everyone down a notch. It's not Stalinism he's thinking of, though, really, but rather Charlie Stross's third great evil of modernity, high technocracy. Stalinists would have planned your energy requirements in advance.
He suggests instead that what we really need is a device that handles all the appliances behind it according to rules you set up, and that receives a feed of data about electricity prices, marginal CO2 emissions, and loads on the grid. Which presupposes a standard for announcing grid data onto the Web; RSS for power stations.
But I'm sceptical on a few things; as far as I can tell, demand response is much more useful for managing the grid than for shaving down demand overall. Which is great, but it falls foul of one of my beefs with much of the official green movement; the macro-micro issue. You can't open a newspaper without being lectured by the lifestyle pages about fairly marginal changes; you rarely see anything about moving big chunks of the energy budget.
And I think the geekosphere is guilty of this; Wattson, AMEE and friends are cool, but it's all about shaving percentages here and there. Consider this post about the huge economic returns on US Federal energy efficiency R&D; it's all about building components, fridge compressors and the like. There's a management consulting piece of quasiwisdom that says that it's always better to remove empty work (muda) from a process than to optimise it. But who wants to discuss lumps of building material?
On the good side, though, I notice that prices for my favourite pet project are coming down gradually. And I like this quote a lot:
Anything that lets you buck entropy has to be good, but there are some serious problems to get over. James dislikes some versions of this as being too Stalinist - the grid reliability controller reaches out and turns everyone down a notch. It's not Stalinism he's thinking of, though, really, but rather Charlie Stross's third great evil of modernity, high technocracy. Stalinists would have planned your energy requirements in advance.
He suggests instead that what we really need is a device that handles all the appliances behind it according to rules you set up, and that receives a feed of data about electricity prices, marginal CO2 emissions, and loads on the grid. Which presupposes a standard for announcing grid data onto the Web; RSS for power stations.
But I'm sceptical on a few things; as far as I can tell, demand response is much more useful for managing the grid than for shaving down demand overall. Which is great, but it falls foul of one of my beefs with much of the official green movement; the macro-micro issue. You can't open a newspaper without being lectured by the lifestyle pages about fairly marginal changes; you rarely see anything about moving big chunks of the energy budget.
And I think the geekosphere is guilty of this; Wattson, AMEE and friends are cool, but it's all about shaving percentages here and there. Consider this post about the huge economic returns on US Federal energy efficiency R&D; it's all about building components, fridge compressors and the like. There's a management consulting piece of quasiwisdom that says that it's always better to remove empty work (muda) from a process than to optimise it. But who wants to discuss lumps of building material?
On the good side, though, I notice that prices for my favourite pet project are coming down gradually. And I like this quote a lot:
The Roadster is faster then anything on the road, including the young guy in a fuel cell SUV who improbably challenged me to a Saturday night race on Hollywood Blvd.
Sunday, December 14, 2008
a cloud of reinforced concrete
Well, very cool. Yahoo has an API that's meant to let you do database-like read operations on anything web - you just pass your SELECT... statement and the URL and a few other arguments, and it chucks back a JSON document with your information. I haven't managed to make it do anything interesting yet, but then, my requirements may be strange. And it doesn't do SELECT COUNT... or GROUP BY... statements, so there are some fairly strict limits on its usefulness. It's true, however, that had it existed a while ago it would have rendered part of the Viktorfeed much easier. But, y'know, it's mine.
I'm tempted, once I manage to make it do something useful, to build a sort of Web 2.0 turducken - after all, the query could be applied to a Google search URL, or better, to the Google archive of USENET.
The new version of IBM Many Eyes lets you provide various kinds of URLs as data sources in a visualisation, and I could embed that in the blog, and if only Wordpress.com would let you do that, the initial request would be initiated by something running on a Wordpress website, using an IBM backend, to slurp data from a Yahoo! URL, that points at an SQL emulator somewhere in there, that gets data from an HTML parser in there, that operates on query results from Google, results which originate from some bored and kinky academic shooting the breeze over an underutilised departmental T-1 in 1992. Perhaps I could work in updates on Twitter, too.
But doesn't this remind you of something - specifically the joke about the convoluted program which involves a document being printed out, placed on a brown table, photographed, and scanned? Think of all those layers of caching servers, app servers, Web frameworks, standard libraries, bureaucracy, operating systems, virtualisation, before you get to an actual computer. No wonder Richard Stallman don't like it.
This tension has always defined the culture of IT; the Big Database, the mainframe, the semiconductor fab on one side, the Lone Hacker and the Garage Startup on the other. Like all good myths, it's highly flexible in practice; a lot of people started off as the second and made the ancient march to the right as they got old and rich and conservative, and the very origins of the second are in huge state-run research labs.
It's also highly ambiguous - people who at least think they are on the side of the second are often the archetypal Internet libertarians and the warbloggers yelling for torture, and doesn't the ordered, white concrete Arthur C. Clarke world of the first sound good now?
In an out of the way corner of Oregon, Amazon is joining Google and Microsoft in building a really enormous data centre, to take advantage of cheap hydroelectricity and water cooling. The power comes from the New Deal. At the end of the 1930s, the US Federal Government built a string of big dams there; their first customer for the power was the aluminium industry as it geared up first to supply the RAF and then to create the USAAF. As a result, Boeing would build the 707, B-47, B-52, 727, 747, 737, 757, 767, and 777 in Seattle.
Today, it's still the Bonneville Power Administration which Amazon will be paying for the electricity and cool water its IT factory needs. You can't get around the infrastructure. Decisions we take now will last as long; will there one day be an IT equivalent of the Lochaber smelter, somewhere with fibre in the ground and wind in the sky?
I'm tempted, once I manage to make it do something useful, to build a sort of Web 2.0 turducken - after all, the query could be applied to a Google search URL, or better, to the Google archive of USENET.
The new version of IBM Many Eyes lets you provide various kinds of URLs as data sources in a visualisation, and I could embed that in the blog, and if only Wordpress.com would let you do that, the initial request would be initiated by something running on a Wordpress website, using an IBM backend, to slurp data from a Yahoo! URL, that points at an SQL emulator somewhere in there, that gets data from an HTML parser in there, that operates on query results from Google, results which originate from some bored and kinky academic shooting the breeze over an underutilised departmental T-1 in 1992. Perhaps I could work in updates on Twitter, too.
But doesn't this remind you of something - specifically the joke about the convoluted program which involves a document being printed out, placed on a brown table, photographed, and scanned? Think of all those layers of caching servers, app servers, Web frameworks, standard libraries, bureaucracy, operating systems, virtualisation, before you get to an actual computer. No wonder Richard Stallman don't like it.
This tension has always defined the culture of IT; the Big Database, the mainframe, the semiconductor fab on one side, the Lone Hacker and the Garage Startup on the other. Like all good myths, it's highly flexible in practice; a lot of people started off as the second and made the ancient march to the right as they got old and rich and conservative, and the very origins of the second are in huge state-run research labs.
It's also highly ambiguous - people who at least think they are on the side of the second are often the archetypal Internet libertarians and the warbloggers yelling for torture, and doesn't the ordered, white concrete Arthur C. Clarke world of the first sound good now?
In an out of the way corner of Oregon, Amazon is joining Google and Microsoft in building a really enormous data centre, to take advantage of cheap hydroelectricity and water cooling. The power comes from the New Deal. At the end of the 1930s, the US Federal Government built a string of big dams there; their first customer for the power was the aluminium industry as it geared up first to supply the RAF and then to create the USAAF. As a result, Boeing would build the 707, B-47, B-52, 727, 747, 737, 757, 767, and 777 in Seattle.
Today, it's still the Bonneville Power Administration which Amazon will be paying for the electricity and cool water its IT factory needs. You can't get around the infrastructure. Decisions we take now will last as long; will there one day be an IT equivalent of the Lochaber smelter, somewhere with fibre in the ground and wind in the sky?
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Bonus Tim Worstall Stupidity Watch
Shorter Tim, Energy Edition:
Tim - nuclear power stations are made from reinforced concrete. What is reinforced concrete reinforced WITH? Perhaps this is why he doesn't go on about his metals trading business so much these days.
Actually, the article he's drivelling about is fairly sensible and much more optimistic than either Timmeh's deranged take on it or the Obscurer's headline; it is here. Basically, the worldwide boom in wind power is putting the industry under capacity constraints; like, say, the semiconductor industry in the PC boom. They can sell'em for almost any price as fast as they come off the line, and they've built up a huge order book. Of course, what will eventually happen is that the wind turbine makers will expand and probably eventually end up flooding the market in a few years' time. This will, however, definitively not happen with nuclear, because a nuclear power station is essentially a working definition of one-off job production; it's a hell of a lot easier to make something cheap when you're making thousands of it on a production line.
Further problems mostly centre on the planning process; both for turbines and for grid interconnection.
Of course, in Timmehworld this shouldn't be happening, because wind power is a bizarre plot organised by British socialists, which no-one else in the world would possibly use. But Tim lives in Portugal, one of the world's biggest and fastest wind developers; and as far as I know, the hens haven't stopped laying, the skies have not darkened, and the rain has not become chubby there. This doesn't change the essential issue, though; his problem is that it's gay electricity.
Commodity prices always come down in the end; except when I really want the price of steel to stay at 2007 levels because it harms the economics of wind power. Further, supply of manufactured goods always responds to price signals except when I have a bizarre ideological opposition to some particular technology. And nuclear power is magically proof against the price of materials, the cost of labour, the rate of interest, and the planning process.
Tim - nuclear power stations are made from reinforced concrete. What is reinforced concrete reinforced WITH? Perhaps this is why he doesn't go on about his metals trading business so much these days.
Actually, the article he's drivelling about is fairly sensible and much more optimistic than either Timmeh's deranged take on it or the Obscurer's headline; it is here. Basically, the worldwide boom in wind power is putting the industry under capacity constraints; like, say, the semiconductor industry in the PC boom. They can sell'em for almost any price as fast as they come off the line, and they've built up a huge order book. Of course, what will eventually happen is that the wind turbine makers will expand and probably eventually end up flooding the market in a few years' time. This will, however, definitively not happen with nuclear, because a nuclear power station is essentially a working definition of one-off job production; it's a hell of a lot easier to make something cheap when you're making thousands of it on a production line.
Further problems mostly centre on the planning process; both for turbines and for grid interconnection.
Of course, in Timmehworld this shouldn't be happening, because wind power is a bizarre plot organised by British socialists, which no-one else in the world would possibly use. But Tim lives in Portugal, one of the world's biggest and fastest wind developers; and as far as I know, the hens haven't stopped laying, the skies have not darkened, and the rain has not become chubby there. This doesn't change the essential issue, though; his problem is that it's gay electricity.
Friday, October 17, 2008
Attack Of The Camorset
Cameron today outlined his plans for economic responsibility to replace "irresponsible capitalism and irresponsible government" under Labour. He began his attack by accusing the prime minister of basing his financial decisions on "false assumptions" that he said had left the economy in ruins.Eh? A Tory complaining that the economy is too dependent on housing and financial services? Yes.
Among them were the ideas that a successful economy could be built on a "narrow base of housing, public spending and financial services" and "that you could abolish boom and bust, and that the good times would last forever".
"We've got to broaden our economic base to include more science, more hi-tech services, more green technologies, more engineering and more high-value manufacturing, drawing upon a much wider range of industries, markets, people, towns and cities."Did he just say that? Did Dave from PR just announce a medium-term industrial strategy? This is, by any measure, a political moment of the first order; the Tories, the people who decided UK plc should be a huge investment bank based in London, ran a high interest rate and strong pound policy that killed off most of engineering and high-value manufacturing, and whose pet thinktank apparently believes the North should be evacuated...they said that?
Perhaps they've realised that yes, Virginia, the UK is no longer an oil exporter because they pissed it all up the wall in the 80s and 90s, and that turn-London-into-a-huge-investment-bank thing ain't looking so clever any more. Perhaps they've found one of Michael Heseltine's old memos from his shakeout'n'invest period in the files. OK, then, where do I sign?
But what is this?
He dismissed critics who believed that "permanent state intervention" was the only way to avoid a repeat of the problems. Those who believed the change the country needed was a "turn to the left" were wrong, he said, as he promised to inject greater responsibility into the economy through a centre-right platform of measuresResponsible us back the DNA-sequencer activities of Amersham International plc, willya? Could you perhaps responsible up a wave power industry while you're there? Anyway, before we slide into bitterness...there's also this.
He promised a new debt responsibility mechanism, with the Bank of England required to write regularly to the Financial Services Authority about sustainability of the level of debt in the economy. "If the level of debt is growing unsustainably, the bank will instruct the FSA to ensure banks either slow their lending or put aside more capital."So no permanent state intervention....except for the bit where you take powers to intervene in the management of the entire banking sector, including the bits that are still independent of the state. Also, direct government controls on lending? Isn't that the Sovietisation of Britain or something? What next, exchange control stamps in your passport?
But that's apparently it. Cameron is planning to regenerate the entire industrial base (and "high tech services", which I think means BT Global Services 'cos we don't have any other firms like that since Leo Computers in the 1960s), and he intends to do this simply by running a smaller budget deficit, and imposing a bank lending corset. He's not even promising any tax cut ponies.
There is one actual measure in there, though. Apparently he wants to change the insolvency laws to protect "sound but struggling businesses" (and again, there's a sick laugh from the 80s for you...). But how is this going to interrelate with the Cameron Corset proposal? Camorset for short, which sounds nicely like the sort of southwest-central shire where the buggers come from. If it's harder to cut off credit to those "sound but struggling" businesses, but the banks have to reduce their loan books 'cos Dave says so, where do they cut? Doesn't that imply they'll have to bear down on everyone else even more? Why should a sound business that's not struggling quite enough to be protected take the punishment? (Why don't any Tories seem to understand marginal economics at all?)
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