Solving pollution through visual shame

Can't remember if I've mentioned this idea before. Apologies if I have.

Most of our most disgusting, polluting and selfish behaviour doesn't look that damaging at first glance. It's easy to ignore. This is certainly the case with motor vehicles. The roads are packed with unnecessarily massive vehicles powered by inefficient, oversized engines designed solely to make inadequate men and women feel important. They pump out huge amounts of poisonous fumes and lead directly to illness and early deaths.

But of course the driver thinks that he or she is unaffected. The air conditioning is on, and there's no obvious sign of the fumes. My first solution to this would probably be impractical: route just enough of the exhaust back into the vehicle's cabin so that the driver and passengers are left with impaired breathing and skin that permanently reeks of burning fuel.

As a poor second choice, how's this? Add a harmless coloured and fragranced dye to the exhaust outlet. A 4x4 would pump out thick clouds of black smoke, stinking of toxic substances. Or perhaps dog shit. A mid-efficiency car would produce greyer, slightly less voluminous clouds flavoured with brussels sprouts, chip fat, kippers or something equally unpleasant. Highly efficient cars would produce gentle blue or pink clouds fragranced with pine or apple scent. Emissions-free cars would merely exude an air of smugness. And perhaps recorded applause.

This way, drivers would be forced to see the consequences of their behaviour in an immediate fashion, and we'd all know which people and vehicles to avoid. It would work because most of the beautiful cars are also the most poisonous - Rolls, Ferrari, Range Rover, Porsche, Aston Martin. If we add smoke and stench, the drivers are forced to confront the hypocrisy of cocooning themselves in luxury while making others suffer.

(Another road-safety plan I have is to make anyone with points on their licences display large stickers of small children in crosshairs, like fighter pilot aces had tallies on their planes. One for each point as a public service warning). And Jeremy Clarkson should just have a photo of him on the bonnet so we all know he's around.

Well, that's OK then (no, not really: run, Americans)

God, it turns out, won't allow global warming, so we can all stop worrying and spending money on environmental projects.

Says who?

Says, John Shimkus.

Who?

Ah. This is where it gets a little worrying. He's. Well. He's the US Congressman who's running for the Chairman's position on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. If he wins, he's the most powerful man in the world on environmental matters, because he can block anything Obama proposes, and can try to repeal the pathetic environmental laws already in place in the USA (by far the biggest polluter on earth per capita).

Shimkus has also called an energy bill incorporating cap and trade measures for carbon emissions as the "largest assault on democracy and freedom in this country that I've ever experienced."  His position on carbon emissions includes the belief that reducing carbon dioxide will be detrimental for plant life.

In a way, he's actually an improvement on most Christian Republican loons. Many of those who are actually persuaded that global warming is happening (a minority) think that climate change is part of the End Times and shouldn't be prevented: it's God's will.



I think I'll go back to bed. For ever.

Why we're all going to die

almost 20 percent of electricity consumption in U.S. homes goes to AC -- that's as much electricity as the entire continent of Africa uses for all purposes.

Basically, large parts of the US would be uninhabitable were it not for air-conditioning. The same goes for Saudi Arabia and several other places.

It has allowed us to put cities in very fragile ecological zones like the desert area where Phoenix is, or the fringes of the Everglades, or actually out into the Everglades now in South Florida. We build up these big Sun Belt cities on the assumption of air-conditioning, so there's limited green space. The heat island effect becomes pretty overwhelming -- all the asphalt, concrete, and steel are trapping heat that's then released throughout the night. In Phoenix you can easily have a lot of nights where the temperature never drops below 90, while in the normal desert climate you get a big drop in temperature.

Until we get sensible and abandon Texas, we'll just have to accept that the Western lifestyle will sink islands and drown poor brown people. We're too selfish to do anything about it, like change our way of life or adopt clean technology. Changing costs money. The status quo only costs lives. Other people's lives, which appear not to count.

The most expensive 23 words in history?

When the Pope turned up for a visit last month, it cost the British taxpayer £10m, which annoyed a lot of people, though I'm not particularly bothered - lots of other heads of state with blood on their hands are wined and dined at our expense: Ceaucescu even got a medal, and Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath from the Queen (1989: Mugabe got one too), while the French gave him the Legion d'Honneur: the conservative press didn't even murmur a complaint.

However, the government didn't pay the £10m out of a single account: it was split between various departments according to relevance. The environment and energy ministry had to cough up £3.7m, money which could have been spent on solar panels, a turbine or any number of insulation projects.

What did the Pope say about environmentalism?

"The Holy See also looks forward to exploring with the United Kingdom new ways to promote environmental responsibility, to the benefit of all."

At £160,856.56 per word, that's money well spent. "Greenest government ever", according to Cameron.

It's all just hot air

I'm off now, but I thought I'd settle an argument before I go.

I'm really bored with endless aggressive arguments between talking heads on TV about climate change. Proper scientists make the case for anthropogenic climate change (i.e. we did it). Then the presenter turns to some unqualified loon (e.g. Nigel Lawson, disastrous Tory Chancellor, degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics, who has set up a skeptic thinktank) or a retired professor in a non-climate change subject) and treats them as though they know what they're talking about.

Usually, it's 'global warming is a huge leftwing conspiracy', though the purpose and practicalities are never spelled out. How do you get tens of thousands of socially-awkward nerds to agree to a massive plot?

Anyway, those days should now be over, thanks to the sterling work of Anderegg, Prall, Harold and Schneider of Stanford University, who have published a paper analysing the climate science debate.

Their findings:
1. There isn't a balanced debate to be had, which will be news to, well, news organisations. 97-98% of climate science researchers who actively publish peer-reviewed papers believe on scientific grounds that we've altered the climate through human activity.
2. These researchers have massively more academic credibility and experience than the tiny group who oppose the theory. They publish more, they publish more in peer-reviewed journals and they've been working in the field more.

So there we have it. There's no conspiracy, just a hugely overwhelming amount of data collected by serious scientists on one side, and some ideologically-motivated morons on the other: morons who don't have the courage to submit their ideas to scrutiny by their peers, but prefer to rush to the airwaves.

Let's just get on with mitigation and reduction. Perhaps while we wean ourselves off fossil fuels, the media can wean itself of pointless confrontational arguments and learn a little bit about science.

Milk with your icecap?

OK, it's not as bad as driving an SUV or flying off for long weekends, but your coffee habit is killing polar bears:

The carbon footprint of a cup of tea or coffee:

21g CO2e: black tea or coffee, boiling only the water you need 

53g CO2e: white tea or coffee, boiling only the water you need 

71g CO2e: white tea or coffee, boiling double the water you need 

235g CO2e: a large cappuccino 

340g CO2e: a large latte

Some of my colleagues consumer loads of expensive lattes through the day. What damage do they cause over a year?

Three large lattes per day, by contrast, and you're looking at almost twenty times as much carbon, equivalent to flying half way across Europe.

It's mostly the milk - which I gave up a while back, though not for environmental reasons. Every pint you waste drinking it could have made cheese!

I also gave up coffee - several a day at work meant I was completely spaced out in the morning, then felt ill and exhausted in the afternoon - more than once I crawled under the desk for a little snooze. I really hurt my head on the underside of the desk, waking up in a hurry when someone walked in during last summer. 

Now I mostly drink mint tea. At the moment, it's as environmentally friendly as possible: I use mint leaves torn from my own plant. 

I Can't Believe We Let These People Build Our Exploding Oil Platforms

I like Bill Maher. He's a polemical, funny satirist who's pretty sharp on religion, actually likes science and annoys religious people. This time, he's despairing of British people (who, like most English people, he calls English). Apparently, the endless stream of distorted, lying bullshit about climate change (I'm thinking particularly of the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Mail and the Daily Express - oh dear, millions of readers each, and all Tory Scum)

People are always accusing me of hating America and calling it stupid, so tonight I'd like to take a few moments to hate England and call it stupid. Because now English people don't believe in global warming either. I thought the English were smarter than that. The home of Newton and Darwin. I can't believe we let these people build our exploding oil platforms.

Even scarier is why people have stopped thinking global warming is real. One major reason pollsters say is we had a very cold, snowy winter. Which is like saying the sun might not be real because last night it got dark. And my car's not real because I can't find my keys.

That's the problem with our obsession with always seeing two sides of every issue equally -- especially when one side has a lot of money. It means we have to pretend there are always two truths, and the side that doesn't know anything has something to say. On this side of the debate: Every scientist in the world. On the other: Mr. Potato Head.

There is no debate here -- just scientists vs. non-scientists, and since the topic is science, the non-scientists don't get a vote. We shouldn't decide everything by polling the masses. Just because most people believe something doesn't make it true. This is the fallacy called argumentum ad numeram: the idea that something is true because great numbers believe it.

…take this recent headline: "TV weathercasters divided on global warming." Who gives a shit? My TV weathercaster is a bimbo with big tits who used to be on a soap opera on Telemundo.

I seem to remember that during our cold winter, the Express had a front page reading 'Global Warming? It's the coldest winter in decades'.

I've got news for the Express (try this for a completely untrue story). It's hot today. The hottest day of the year. By that newspaper's scientific standards, it's irreproachable proof that global warming's real. But I don't think we'll see an apology in tomorrow's edition.

A couple of tips:
1. Weather isn't climate
2. The UK's kept warm by the Gulf Stream. We should have Canadian weather. If the Arctic icecaps melt, the Gulf Stream may move away. So global warming will cause local cooling.

It's not just Tory Scum newspapers - last week, the Observer's science correspondent wrote of miracle fish oil trials which improved child concentration and skills ('Fish Oil Helps Children To Concentrate'. As Ben Goldacre writes in today's Guardian (the Observer's sister paper), pretty much every detail was wrong. There was a study, but it wasn't of fish oils, it didn't show any improvement, it didn't measure children's concentration and the sample groups were of 12 kids each - basically no good at all. Still, you can't beat a good headline even if the article is a disgraceful travesty of journalism.

Tip for science journalists: please link to the papers you're distorting.
Tip for science readers: if the first sentence ends with '…scientists say', it means they probably don't. Science is complicated and doesn't lend itself well to headlines and short sentences. Unless, of course, that headline reads 'Massive Asteroid You Can Clearly See Getting Bigger Each Day Is Definitely Going To End All Life On Earth, Scientists Say'.

Et in Arcadia ego

Even Wolverhampton could be transformed into a bucolic wonderland: there's a plan to turn the deserted quarter (!) of Detroit into semi-rural farmland and parkland, providing healthy food, jobs and a better quality of life for this semi-derelict city.

Wolverhampton too has vast swathes of abandoned industrial land - imagine the possibilities. We could grow our own poppies for organic, low-mileage heroin, murder victims can add to the richness of the soil, and pigs can root around happily until they're turned into the local delicacies - kebabs and pork scratchings.

OK, I'm mocking slightly, but it's a great idea. More and more people are living in apartments rather than houses, and there's plenty of land to spare. There'd be some social upheaval and the land would need decontamination, but green cities would help socially and environmentally.

I've always wanted to persuade local authorities of a very simple idea: each new dwelling (flat, house or office) should have a fruit tree. The fruit would be healthy, and the tree would contribute to carbon reduction, improve air quality and reduce local temperatures, thus aiding the fight against global warming. There's no downside, and it would be cheap.

I'd also replace all railings, fences, crash barriers, bollards and dividing wall under local government control with hedges: they'd be equally effective as dividers, don't require mining, smelting and high energy construction, be cheap and easy to maintain, contribute to carbon reduction and air quality, be easy to remove/replace when underground maintenance is required, be good for security and separating cars from people (who's going to push through a holly bush rather than walk along to a crossing?), wildlife would massively benefit, and they'd be aesthetically pleasing - urban life would be transformed. How about it?

A little good news for Americans

My last post wasn't very Christmassy, was it? Perhaps it's because the world's clearly utterly screwed - Copenhagen was a shameful, embarassing display of reactionary realpolitik, made worse by Obama's refusal to live up to his rhetoric. If you want an even more depressing reading of the summit, try Mark Lynas's eye-witness account: he's a serious thinker who knows his stuff, and he blames China.

However, he was limited by the strictures of his Senate and Congress, bodies packed with corporate shills more interested in the opinions of their paymasters than their constituents or scientists - it's no coincidence that the most vehement enemy of climate science is James Inhofe, recipient of more funding by oil, gas and coal corporations than any other Senator.

The same problem is facing Obama's attempt to pass even a weak version of a National Health Service: insurance companies, making billions from insuring only healthy rich people, have spun these plans as Stalinism, complete with 'death panels' and compulsory abortions for all. Yet, finally, a start has been made, a weak bill has got past the Senate, and that American hero, Senator Bernie Sanders (socialist! Go Vermont!) has sneaked in more cash for free clinics, mental health care and all the other Cinderella services usually ignored in the rush for profit. We salute you.

So what was the Pringles tube for?

I asked, and you provided many and varied responses. None of them were correct.

Neal utilised the tube to make me………………………… The Melanie Philips Newspaper Rack© (quotes below are from the hilarious interview linked to by her name). In case you don't know her, she's the shrillest, least informed, most opinionated, most often wrong, most reactionary and most unpleasant journalist in the country - more so even than Jan Moir, because Philips is more intelligent. She has turned her talent towards evil. For instance, she believes that climate change just isn't happening and is a big communist plot (qualifications - zero), putting her in the company of this charming fellow and this one, and she calls London Londonistan which apparently isn't racist, whereas having even the slightest scintilla of doubt about anything Israel does is anti-semitic and you may as well wear an SS uniform and burn Jews every weekend because you are a Holocaust denier. Obama, to her, is 'in the Islamists' camp' and became a Christian as an electoral tactic… And she thinks the MMR vaccine causes autism, which is a sure sign of an uninformed fruitcake.

Multiculturalism, she writes, "has become the driving force of British life, ruthlessly policed by a state-financed army of local and national bureaucrats enforcing a doctrine of state-mandated virtue to promote racial, ethnic and cultural difference and stamp out majority values". British nationhood is being disembowelled by "mass immigration, multiculturalism and the onslaught mounted by secular nihilists against the country's Judeo-Christian values."

The key to her analysis is her belief in a general collapse of values or, in her words, "the creation of a debauched and disorderly culture of instant gratification, with disintegrating families, feral children and violence, squalor and vulgarity on the streets". This is combined, she believes, with a profound anti-semitism among people who do not realise that "the fight against Israel is not fundamentally about land. It is about hatred of the Jews".

"The capture of all society's institutions, such as schools, universities, churches, the media, the legal profession, the police and voluntary groups. This intellectual elite was persuaded to sing from the same subversive hymn sheet so that the moral beliefs of the majority would be replaced by those on the margins of society, the perfect ambience in which the Muslim grievance culture could be fanned into the flames of extremism."

She writes, of course, for the Daily Mail.

The newspaper rack is perfectly designed, as you can see, to shut her up by cramming her mouth with The Guardian, which is her nemesis. The speech bubble is wipe-clean, enabling me to replace her old lunacies with fresh ones.

Melanie Philips: proof that you can be intelligent and stupid, or cynical ranter for money? Whatever the case, she makes me angrier than anyone else on the planet. This includes Michael Portillo. He was the son of Spanish Republican refugees who betrayed them by becoming one of the most rightwing Conservative government ministers in recent history. He made me shout extremely rude words at the television this morning. It was a repeat of one of his post-politics travel shows, in which he extolled the beauty and efficiency of the Spanish hyper-fast railway network.

Why did this make me angry, you may ask. After all, you love trains and foreigners, Vole. (Yes, Melanie, I do.) Well children, it made me angry because Portillo was one of the Conservative minister who privatised Britain's railway network. They broke it up into stupid little parcels and sold the scraps at a knockdown price to their flaky, dodgy, asset-stripping financier friends, who turned a tired but functional service into a shiny, awful, unreliable service which is Europe's most expensive. So for him to spend licence-payers' money grinning smugly from the seat of a fast, luxurious train we'll never have because he stole the network from us is UTTERLY UNCONSCIONABLE. The total, total bastard. How DARE he?

And yet, Melanie Philips is worse. Portillo's a well-fed smug turncoat. Philips is actually, deliberately evil because she refuses to think past her prejudices, despite having the intelligence to do so.

Europe: brave new democracy.

I like Europe, as a geographical entity and as an ideal. I'd love to be part of a democratic USE. More than that, I'd love to be a citizen of the USSE. I think that economic cooperation, environmental solidarity and the free exchange of ideas, citizens and fairly-traded goods are brilliant.

I don't think that distorting subsidies, imperialist expansion, hostility to Muslims and the world's poor, corruption, decades of qualified accounts, Buggins' Turn and secret deals are the way to achieve the Europe of which I dream.

Take the European Parliament. I am a political junkie. I can reel off candidates, failed candidates, interesting by-elections results and a host of other things without a moment's thought. I can't name my MEPs though (except for Michael Cashman - what an ironic name. He should be in the House of Commons).

I do know that the European Parliament has two parliaments (Brussels and Strasbourg, leading to convoys of lorries full of documents shuttling between the two, and MEPs guzzling carbon like it's crack) and no power to pass laws. What an utter waste of time and money: the only people we actually directly elect - and fund magnificently - have no authority at all. Lovely.

The other thing I know about the European Parliament is that its environmental committe delegation to the Copenhagen Climate talks includes one Nicholas Griffin. Yes, the British National Party (Nazi) leader, who has this to say about climate change (his qualification is a 2.2 law degree):

In a speech in the parliament last week, Griffin denounced those who warn of the consequences of climate change as "cranks". He said they had reached "an Orwellian consensus" that was "based not on scientific agreement, but on bullying, censorship and fraudulent statistics".

"The anti-western intellectual cranks of the left suffered a collective breakdown when communism collapsed. Climate change is their new theology… But the heretics will have a voice in Copenhagen and the truth will out. Climate change is being used to impose an anti-human utopia as deadly as anything conceived by Stalin or Mao."

I'd have thought he'd welcome climate change: an awful lot of poor black people are going to die horribly - which is the basis of his political creed. 

I support the postal strike, but it's good to receive parcels…

I've ordered a lot of books and music recently, and they're starting to trickle through (today: new trousers, Julie Fowlis's Uam and Nancy Elizabeth's Battle and Victory. Yesterday I received James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore's Climate Cover-up: the crusade to deny global warming.

What can I say other than this is a shockingly important book? Like many of you, probably, I vaguely knew that various corporate interests were rigging the 'debate' through front groups, astroturfing and lobbying. What Hoggan and Littlemore have done is fill in the speculation with solid, old-fashioned detective work. They name names, follow the money and delve into the darker arts of corporate image management. It's essential for environmentalists, political scientist and students of the media because it exposes, in detail, the machinations of élites with no interest in a) reality, b) democracy and mostly shockingly, c) actual science.

It isn't a rant: it's a careful dissection of an organised campaign of disinformation which has poisoned the public sphere. You need to read it.

Move along, it's another politics and environment post

Being a rcalcitrant anarcho-syndicalist with Trotskyist leanings, I'm a huge fan of Ken MacLeod, the Scottish Trotskyist-ish science fiction author. He's a brilliant writer and stunningly intelligent.

However, I'm also very, very scared about what we've done to this planet and consequently what we're doing to its poor, mostly black inhabitants, none of whom have done anything to bring the eco-apocalypse down on our heads.

The problem is that the hard left has always seen industrialism as the solution to dragging the proletariat out of its suffering. Being green, to them, equates to being a smug, selfish and hypocritical bourgeois git. And you know, they're right - there are lots of Tory landowners taking long-haul flights to paradise islands, or weekend breaks, while telling the rest of us to recycle.

BUT - it's the poor who'll suffer first. Anyway, back to Ken MacLeod - here's his solution, expressed in his admiration for a techno-fix approach proposed by a learned professor. It's very appealing, and is also a fantasy of the climate change-denying right. The problem, of course, is that it's never this simple, consumption just is damaging, and the benefits won't extend to the poor.

For me, a highlight of a very engaging and informative weekend was a talk by Prof Colin McInnes, DSc FRAes FInstP FRSE FREng, titled 'Random Thoughts of a Techno-Utopist Running Dog'. The usual conception of sustainability, Prof McInnes argued, was a dangerous idea. Technological stagnation only means slower resource depletion. We need continuous technological progress to make new resources available. The idea that we should use less energy is outrageously inhumane and regressive. Most of humanity gets its energy from burning wood and dung. We need a vast increase in energy production. That means nuclear power, including new kinds of nuclear plant such as the Thorium Energy Amplifier. Nuclear waste is just inadequately burned nuclear fuel. We need to find ways of burning it all. Most reycling schemes are feel-good rather than do-good, condemning us to pre-industrial, manual rooting about in rubbish. We need plasma torches and mass spectrometers to really recover all the useful stuff in our waste. 'Humanity is the singularity. We are self-replicating smart matter.' To campaign against cheap flights to Prague while jetting across the world for eco-holidays in the Galapagos is naked class warfare. With synthetic genomics we can have carbon-neutral aviation even cheaper than today's travel.

A healthy glow

Just to prove that greens can be (occasionally half-hearted) sexist pigs too, I give you The Environmentals: models posing outside nuclear power plants - sometimes nude but for a radiation detector…

Northern Ireland: the politics of the madhouse

OK, they aren't killing each other with guns at the moment, but NI seems to have become Mississippi or somewhere like that. Where else would you have a Minister for the Environment who totally rejects climate change? Perhaps, for Sammy Wilson - a DUP member - the word green has too many negative connotations. Now he's banned a government ad encouraging people to switch off their TVs at night - because he believes that earth is 4000 years old and that interfering with God's plan (presumably for our incineration) is a bad thing.