The road to Hell is trod by (reduced) Carbon Footprints

The linked article on “The Low-Carbon Economy” is distressing to me, as is anything with the potential to mess up my life.  Not being of the hair-shirted climate change self-flagellate persuasion, I have not bought into the “climate change” dogma prevalent today, and therefore look very closely at anything coming from “experts” (I’m sick of inverted commas already in the first paragraph) that has the potential to affect me.

The Economy is a nebulous phantasm at the best of times, as is anything which deals with abstracts. The abstracts here are trillions of units of fiat currencies, the default reserve currency still (at time of writing) the $US.  Whatever it is, billions and trillions of these notional credit instruments flash electronically around the globe daily, and somehow maintain everyone’s confidence that we know what we’re doing. 

2008 was the most recent time the wheels came off (or the bubble burst, choose your metaphor) but you can expect some sort of serious economic reverse roughly every decade.  I understand in general how this works, but one of the things I understand very definitely is that people supposedly much smarter than me use financial instruments of their own clever devising to manipulate these money flows for their own benefit.

This entire Sci-Am article is a study in rent-seeking, which sums up the entire Carbon Trading and Green Energy industries as far as I can tell.   As I’ve said many times before, a lot of these Greens are really Watermelons (Green on the outside, Red on the inside) and have ridden this bandwagon for all it’s worth as a means of wealth distribution from First to Third World countries.  An example:

Using green bonds and modified insurance portfolios
If the top financial layer includes big institutional investors and banks, then a second tier of untapped finance lies with insurance companies extending policies to the most vulnerable populations in the developing world.

Through the use of mobile phone-based services and micro-credit institutions, a great deal of insurance has already been extended to what Jim Roth of LeapFrog Investments calls the “emerging consumer.” Over the past eight years, the social investment fund has backed a portfolio of companies selling insurance products totaling $40 million, of which $33 million went to low-income consumers in Africa and Asia.

“It’s an optimistic story,” said Roth, noting that the vast majority of those consumers had never owned insurance before.

“A key difference is they have less money. So the kinds of insurance policies they can buy tend to have lower premiums and less benefits.”

Governments in the developing world are also now pooling their resources into sovereign insurance funds that make payouts for climate adaptation programs, said Fatima Kassam of the African Risk Capacity Insurance Co., a specialized agency of the African Union. Niger received a $25 million payout last year, having paid in with a $3 million premium. “Governments are coming together to change the model on disaster management,” said Kassam.

Let’s be clear about one thing to explain why I’m so bent about this sort of foolishness.  The “insurance” is for climate change adaptation/mitigation.  Since “climate change” can mean literally anything at all that weather/climate does, no traditional insurance company (i.e. one which intends to stay in business) would write policies like this. This is very thinly-disguised wealth transfer.

 

The problem is that despite quantitative easing and no physical standard for our notional currencies, “wealth” is a zero-sum game; the wealth has to come from someone.  I am NOT a redistributionist; “law and order Libertarian” is probably closer to the mark, so I object to beggaring ourselves to make African kleptocrats richer.   

Green energy policies in the UK dramatically raised electricity prices as subsidized (to the producers) wind projects were forced into the market. Although this is now easing, it took clawing back the policies that started it, and similar things have happened in other places too.  Coal is the big thing to hate these days (Obama leading the pack) but it has the advantage of being cheap and abundant.  It’s also dirty, but modern scrubbing tech cleans it up quite acceptably, at least as long as you don’t consider CO2 to be pollution. 

This is where activists end up eventually, when all of the low-hanging fruit has been picked.  Back in the 1960s and 70s pollution was a real problem, and people rightly took action to clean it up. With the sulfur dioxide (acid rain) dealt with in the 1980s, North America and Europe ran out of serious, widespread environmental pollution sources.  Coincidentally or not, this is right when Global Warming popped on the radar as the next apocalypse.  Note that we (and both ice caps) are still here, despite all of the doom-laden pronouncements from 1988 onward.  Beware the “green intentions” of any climate lobby, and follow the money to see why people are really doing what they're doing.

Singularity-minded

What is obvious to anyone with a functioning brain is that there are far more people in this world than any plausibly functional model of our “economy” has a use for.  There are only so many “McJobs” and robots, as the linked article re-hashes, will take most of those. 

The question from there is what to do about that.  I do try in these posts to propose solutions, not merely rail against the myriad of “wrong” in the world, but this one poses a problem to even come up with something which would work, regardless of how unlikely it is to be implemented due to standard human failing and venality.  Here we go anyway.

The population problem is the biggest one.  Back when everything we ate came from family farms and c.80% of the population was occupied doing this, there were c. 1 billion people on Earth.  Now (in developed countries) significantly less than 10%  of the population is engaged in producing our food.

This doesn’t cover all “productive” forms of work, but it does bring the productivity gains of modern technology and organization into focus.  During the early stages of the Industrial Revolution everything was done by hand in a very inefficient but manpower-intensive fashion, resulting in rural depopulation as people rushed to the factories for work.  As time went on and clever people designed labour-saving machines to do unskilled work, those least talented were thrown out of work.  This process began in the 18^th Century and continues today.  Remember that women weren’t part of the workforce at that time (although children were); now we have twice as many people we need to find jobs for.

This frames the problem, but the only two solutions I see popping out of this are:

·         Remove the surplus population, or;

·         Smash our technological base and get us all back making buggy whips or subsistence farming.

It is to be noted that the second option will bring about the first, but without the productivity to make things work; in other words, complete civilizational breakdown.

Nature may soon do something about there being so many of us; Ebola is making its’ way out of Africa for the first time.  The ability of mass international rapid transit to vector diseases worldwide first really got attention during the SARS breakout in 2003, and that had nothing like Ebola’s death rate, albeit it spread even more easily.  Ebola comes in different variants with differing lethality, symptoms and incubation periods so we’ll be dealing with this for a while.  Just imagine if SARS came back too…

Getting back on track, we are in what I’ll call a “luxury-scarcity period”.  It is conceivable to feed everyone, and with very local and temporary exceptions this happens.  If you live in a warm climate (Africa, for example) that is most of what you need to survive; good thing too, given the limited to non-existent social and community housing expenditure there. While there are many people in Western societies who struggle to make ends meet, the number of actually homeless are statistically barely significant and are mostly people with serious mental problems who are essentially un-employable. 

The real question if things don’t completely collapse is: what do we do with the jobless?  I do not believe that there is any “self-evident right’ to anything produced by someone else, although many disagree.  My test of these ideals is how much effort it takes to achieve these “natural” rights.  In this case, it takes the coercive power of a government to make people pay taxes, and it has been always thus.  Breathing is about the only thing that I’d call free, everything else requires somebody to do some work.

“Tax the rich” comes out a lot, usually from people who can’t count past 100 but occasionally from hypocrites like Warren Buffet.  That will not work for the fairly obvious reasons that taxing something makes less of it, and that there isn’t that much money held by “the 1%” compared to what a country spends in a year.   Next year that money won’t be there as the (formerly) rich are confiscated from and those smart enough to see it coming (most of them or they wouldn’t be rich in the first place) will relocate.

There goes the Marxist-Anarchist solution, what next?  Expansion of the current welfare state would seem to be out as that “Scandinavian” model has proven itself unsustainable in the last 20 years.  Shorter work week?  The thing that this glosses over is that there is only so much money in a business to pay people.  If there are 40 person-hours per position and you cut that into 2 chunks, each of them will only be getting paid for 20 hours. 

What all of these ideas have in common is a lowering of living standards. Less money means less stuff, full-stop.  I’ve worked part-time, and it’s great for students or stay-at-home parents who want to generate some more household income while the kids are in school. It was a a time in my life when I had no responsibilities beyond myself and I most certainly could not have supported a familiy on that income. Time is traded for money in pretty-much any type of transaction you can name; the value of that time is highly variable, but however you slice it, ΔTime = Δ$.

Any kind of post-scarcity geek (or other) utopia is based on cheap and abundant energy.  With enough cheap (clean) energy you can do almost anything you want, and paying the heat and light bills of non-productive members of society becomes plausible then..  I am partial to the Culture books of Ian M. Banks as far as post-scarcity sci-fi is concerned, but that construct only works because nearly omniscient AIs are running everything.  The suspension of my disbelief for that is far less of a strain than to assume that people with no profit motive (Star Trek Next Gen) could create and sustain such a thing.

In case you somehow missed it, I am a small-r realist, and I do NOT believe in the perfectibility of Man.  “Pretend to pay them, they pretend to work” didn’t work for Communism so any version of confiscatory taxes intended to level the playing field will have a similar effect.  It takes money (or equivalent) to get stuff done, so I remain at a loss as to how to deal with computers taking our jobs.  It happened to me once already, but the consolations were another job and the fact that the program did a far worse job than I had.  These consolations will be in increasingly short supply.

The irony is that developed countries are just that, developed, and their decreasing birthrates are in step with increases in productivity with Japan leading the way in both.  These countries will not remain prosperous if they have to take in millions of unemployable (because there are no jobs) immigrants (Japan again, but an exception to this).  That is another issue, and panicky diseased epidemic migrants could scupper us all even before the robots do. 

Peninsular Peril

The votes have been cast (by those who didn't boycott the referendum) and Crimea has seceded from Ukraine and wants to go back to Russia. I regard this as a done deal as will any realistic observer, despite the protestations of illegitimacy from Western leaders.

That most people living there would prefer to go with Russia is obvious, even if the fact that Putin continues to gather Russians continues to elude people looking for motivation. It is known that Putin continues to use the immediate recognition of Kosovo after we'd bombed the Serbs out of there as licence to annex his own "self-determining" majority areas back to the Rodina, but not acknowledged by most of the media, let alone Western politicians.

So what? Sure, some people will be unhappy, and Ukraine is out some income from Sevastopol rental to the Russians, but what does that mean to anyone else? Ukraine has had a sequence of corrupt governments since independence from the USSR and I sure as shit don't want to get dragged into another war in Europe. Certainly not over an Anschluss like this, and I see the geopolitical cost to North America to be nil from the Crimea changing hands. The damage from puffing up and making vague threats of sanctions against Russia is potentially great.

A lot of people really didn't like G.W. Bush, but most of them were either lefties for whom realpolitik-clueless Obama can do no wrong, or people GW decided to take some action against, like, say, the late Saddam Hussein. One thing which definitively separates Bush II and Obama is that nobody who counts takes the latter seriously. Even in a no-win situation like the invasion of Georgia by Russia in 2008, Bush made a point of having American assets in the capital (Tbilisi) to present the Russians with an unspoken "red line". It must be noticed that as sub-optimal as things may have turned out for Georgia, the Russians took the hint and pulled most of the way back.

The lost Georgian territory is a lesson to them not to poke the bear, no matter if you're provoked. The lesson to us is (again) Talk - Action = Zero, Action - Talk = >Zero. I don't know what "we" would do if Russia had another crack at Georgia right now, but somebody had better be taking some proactive steps to dissuade Putin from cooking something up in Eastern Ukraine to take that also. After that? Belarus? The Baltic States?

The Balts have less to fear, and more potential European support than Ukraine due to ethnic/national/cultural connections to Europe vice Russia. I may have read The Clash of Civilizations too much, but birds of a feather do flock together and it makes sense to me to draw our lines along those natural fault lines.

I keep talking about action, so what should be done? In practice I don't see a lot of potential for the sort of thing that I think would send the right message, but if Europe still had any armies, it'd be a good time to start scheduling boots-on-the-ground joint exercises with what's left of Ukraine and put some bases in the Baltic States. Physical assets, preferably those which can shoot back, will do the job. Putin doesn't want a war as it's not in his interest to lose more than he'd gain. He will walk into as many places with a Russian majority population as he is permitted to, sanctions be damned.

Whatever. For my money, the next flashpoint is Donetsk, but it's not exactly crystal ball territory to come up with that. This is NOT a fait accompli but if Putin pushes for it he has enough support on the ground to pull it off in some fashion if there is no physical response from "our side". As long as Obama/Kerry are running the US show and the Europeans are beholden to Russia for their heating fuel, it's Putin's geographical and demographic prize to gain, and Ukraine's to lose.

Risk Management and Civilization

The title link is to the oil spill from a pipeline in Alberta in the last week. There is the usual bashing of "Harper" and "Big Oil" but as it came the same week as the following I saw some blog synchronicity:

Japan must restart two nuclear reactors to protect the country's economy and livelihoods, Prime Minister Yoshihiko Noda has said in a televised broadcast.

Measures to ensure the safety of two reactors at western Japan's Ohi nuclear plant have been undertaken, he said.

Since last year's Fukushima nuclear disaster, Japan's 50 reactors have been shut down for routine maintenance.

The crisis fuelled immense public opposition to nuclear power, but Japan is facing a summer of power shortages.

The leftist Utopian mindset is that we should get something for nothing, whether it be services (rioting "students" in Montreal this spring) or "Green" energy. Shit ain't like that, as Newton encapsulated many moons ago. There are reactions to actions, and while these can and should be be mitigated when possible, changing anything from one state to another will have a range of effects, not all of which we want.

That is where the mitigation strategies come in because radical environmentalist cant aside, the era of rampant pollution is past. Air and water are cleaner (in the developed world) than they were 40 years ago, and it's because of improved practices and technology. This brings us to Diminishing Returns and Risk Management.

It's difficult to ascribe priority to one or the other as I can make an argument either way, but for purposes of this post I'll give Risk Management planning priority. I'll also give my own interpretation of RM which is as follows: with a particular end-state in mind (affordable energy, for example) you decide what will do more damage, the various ways of producing it or the effects of not having it.

I'm sure that's close enough for unpaid work (e.g. here) to work with, and the position of the Japanese PM re: reactors is pretty much a textbook example of risk management. With all reasonable (more on that in a bit) precautions taken, the damage to society would be far greater if the power generation is foregone than the risk presented by the possibility of accident in the production of it.

It's NOT about wringing ones' hands about the worst-case-scenario and assuming that (however unlikely it is) will be what happens. In this case, something pretty close to the worst case happened at Fukushima, and as much of a mess as it is NOBODY HAS DIED because of the radiation released from it. This is after an old (and sub-optimally designed) fission reactor was completely overwhelmed by a massive natural disaster which itself killed over 15,000 people leveled a number of small cities and actually changed the elevation of those seaside areas.

There aren't a lot of ways in which that could get worse in terms of what happened in the end result at the reactor complex itself. The Wikipedia link seems (at tme of writing) well balanced, and even the worst-case reputable estimate for lifetime cancer increase amoungst those exposed (100 cases) pales in comparison to the devastation wrought by any good-sized quake in Japan. Fukushima was rated at the same level of "devastation" as Chernobyl which is questionable at the very least from the point of view of fatalities.

Chernobyl was indeed the worst case (see link above) and I notice that the world has not ended, save for the <300 people who died as a direct result of it. Risk Management in the USSR was a very blunt instrument, leading to bad designs like the RMBK reactors. Three Mile Island marked the death knell of the American nuclear power program and NOBODY even got measurably sick from it.

The word for the reaction to all of these events is "panic". I'm not a fan of panic, but there are times when some healthy caution is in order when things go wrong. It breaks, you fix it, you carry on. You do it with your car (or bike if you're a real Green hardcase), you don't say "OMG, it broke and it could fail catastrophically, cars/bikes must be banned!"

Back to the oil spill. These have happened thousands of times in the last 100+ years and again, the world has yet to end as we know it or otherwise. I am not a fan of industrial accidents, but a certain failure rate is the price of doing anything that accomplishes anything. We take reasonable precautions, the state of "reasonable" being a moving target depending on time and perspective.

Enter Diminishing Returns. Of course if we have no rules we see all sorts of short-term gain behaviour which is why unbridled capitalism is a bad idea. That said, the "worker's paradise" of the USSR and satellite Commie states made a MUCH bigger mess of the environment than the Evil Capitalist West. At a certain point in trying to improve something you will hit that point when a further 1% improvement in x will require increasingly more effort past the diminishing returns point than what led to it.

It happens with schoolwork, it happens at work and it gets to the point where further improvement is either impossible or would be uneconomical in effort or expense. Zero-defect is what we seem to expect these days, and that 's not the way things work. The key to keeping the wheels on is to not getting bogged down striving for perfection, but to keep moving forward as best we can.

Cheap clean energy is the key to the future, and the dividing line on the global warming/climate change seems to involve the definition of what is cheap and what exactly is clean. Right now natural gas seems to split the difference with only radical anti-CO2 wingnuts having a problem with it. The supposed "environmentally friendly" sources of wind and solar are anything but, and hydrocarbon based energy will be with us for the foreseeable future. As we will also be around for the (by definition) foreseeable future, we have to do the best we can to not "shit where we eat".

The best we can do will never completely eliminate human error or materials failure. We can however keep improving things as long as we keep things in perspective and keep the people who are producing what we need honest. People aren't good at thinking rationally about stuff so we'll make a mess of it, but in the meantime we'll keep the lights on and our food coming to us by making as few errors as possible while not making it impossible for people to do the things we need them to. Mistakes will be made, but clean them up, learn the appropriate lessons and keep moving forward.

Post-ish Scarcity, Energy, and learning from Failure

Today I'll do something a bit different for this blog and talk about ideas I have been considering from literature, specifically SF. I've been reading a fair bit of Iain M. Banks of late, and have been thinking about his setting of The Culture and how it relates to what we have now and are likely to get to based on our present trajectory.

First off, The Culture is a Utopia, so instantly suspicious to realists such as myself. It is not made out to be perfect, but in terms of everyday life it's as close as no matter. The phrase "post-scarcity" came up at a party I was at a while ago, albeit in the context of today's world. The Culture takes that concept to its' logical conclusion, with the caveat that the frame of reference has been shifted significantly.

Communism and (to a lesser extent) Anarchy have been tried out and found severely wanting; this is in comparison to a well-run liberal democracy which is merely wanting. The best possible government you can get is an enlightened despot, but they are exceedingly rare. The key constant in all of these systems is people. As long as you have people, you will have human emotions and drives gumming up the works. Banks gets around this by putting seriously powerful AIs in charge of everything, leaving people to do anything they want as long as it doesn't hurt anyone else.

We don't live there and as far as I can see we never will. What we need to deal with though is the people who think this is achievable. One of the things which pushed me toward this was a protest which students were having in Montreal about hikes in their tuition rates, still the lowest in the country. They are emblematic of people who forget that this is not a completely Post-Scarcity world.

Things need to be paid for; there are no magical gnomes or super advanced technology resembling magic which will build your house or grow your food. Obvious, I know, but there are a surprising number of people who don't understand it. We live in the most fortunate age civilization has seen, with all but the very poorest having luxuries (proper heating, electricity, hot running water) which the Kings and Emperors of all previous ages could not have had for any sum.

Perfection? No. As close as we'll get? Doesn't have to be. The key is cheap clean energy and advanced technology, and either one will get you the other, therefore both. I'll start with Energy.

Energy at its' most basic is the ability of something to do work, and I recommend the link as a refresher (if you need one) about how energy and matter relate. As "doing work" is how things get done, energy is obviously the key to everything else. Hell, with enough energy you can re-arrange matter at the atomic level (e.g. making elements in a linear accelerator). I am not a physicist by any means, so I won't get too far into this, except to say that the cost of energy effects the cost of everything else.

I thought that was obvious too, but apparently not. Taking the simplest connection, if the price of petrol goes up it costs you (and everyone and everything else) more to get around. This has the compound effect of reducing your discretionary income and increasing the price of things you would drive out to buy. Result: standard of living goes down, economy contracts. We're living it right now.

Enter the Entitlement Generation. I am working hard to NOT raise my children like that, but the results are all around us and it started at the tail end of (my) Generation X. I am by nature a rather lazy person, but I am also a responsible one. I accept (or at least understand) the kicking that I often take from the Type-A types who rise to the top of my organization. I do the best with what I have, but I know that some other people will be better than me at certain things.

This I consider to be a realistic and healthy (albeit somewhat depressing at times) appraisal of the world and how it works. So, I will work and accept that I will never rise to the top, as they are looking for things I don't have. This is as it should be, but there are a LOT of people (mostly young) who don't get it. You cannot (with rare but notable exceptions) do whatever you want just because you put your mind to it. Trust me, I've tried a lot of things that way and it ain't how things work for most people.

They'd love Banks' "Culture"; so would I but we're nowhere close. We need rules and we need Rule of Law to keep the decision makers in line. While I was in the gym this morning I saw a business school guy talking about the cost of education and making choices. People are talking about free education, but he wasn't having any of it, and with good reason.

Enter "Opportunity Cost": The cost of an alternative that must be forgone in order to pursue a certain action. Put another way, the benefits you could have received by taking an alternative action. So, you want someone else to pay your opportunity cost for you (e.g. free tuition)? Proponents of free education call it "an investment in society" but if so it's a bad one. Again, not an economist, but off the top of my head I don't see the extra tax income from graduates offsetting the investment in them in any kind of a hurry. What it amounts to is everyone else paying more taxes so that YOU can get ahead: in other words, an entitlement.

There are all sorts of people in universities who shouldn't be there in the first place, simply on academic achievement and potential. I went to class with a lot of them and often wondered how they got out of high school let alone into university. This isn't your top-end universities, but it is most of them.

Vocational and trades training need to be brought back, and I see that some attempts are being made. I have done a lot of really messy jobs to make ends meet before I sorted myself out career-wise, but too many kids won't clean bathrooms or move garbage because it's "below them". Thank you, Princess culture et al. Which brings us back to...

...where does all of our "stuff" come from? Somebody designs it, somebody designs the tools that make it, somebody builds those tools while other people build the building this all goes in. Others extract the raw materials, process them and ship them to the factory. Notice: nary a super-intelligent AI with unbounded energy resources and manipulation to be seen in the process.

My point? Stuff doesn't make itself, ship itself or (oh horrors!) clean up after itself (or you). I don't like cleaning bathrooms any more than anyone else, but I do it (at home) because it needs to be done. In all of this I blame lazy parents. Teaching kids responsibility and accountability is hard and tiring, a.k.a. Work. Kids learn what they're taught; if expectations are low at home, and low at school, they'll never learn anything useful.

Just like our ancestors broke their backs and their health to clear land and build farms and cities, the current and upcoming generations need to work to make better things in order to make things better. It's a lot less of a slog than it was for our predecessors, but we can't coast now. I don't know about you, but I want my (figurative) flying car. Thorium reactors would be a good start though, so let's work on that.

As Ronald Reagan said: If not us, who? If not now, when?

Keystone Quixote

With the Occupy *.* protests going in fits and starts all over North America, I will come back to what I threatened to talk about a little while ago. Specifically that's the Keystone XL pipeline project and more generally, geopolitical energy policy.

Oil is messy stuff; you'll get no arguments from me on the basics. There have been and will be leaks in pipelines all over the world (less when people aren't actively breaching them) so the environmental concerns are not to be dismissed. I do however have some sympathy for those who complain that the facts are being distorted by "celebrity protesters". To try to put this in perspective to facilitate a less fraught risk assessment, let's zoom way out and start from there:













We (and this includes the USA) need petroleum in many forms and we need lots of it. Even if/when we get to the point where we can stop burning it (I hope to live that long at least) we will still need it to make things, and it will need to be transported. Moving as much of the transportation and generation grid (big trucks, power plants etc.) over to natural gas will help to reduce the amount of oil which will be sloshing around the continent, and we have lots of NG so supply will be "merely" logistics. LNG likes to explode if you're careless with it, but it's not much of a spill risk unless it lands on you (really REALLY cold). Although not as completely pollution free as Hydrogen, it's far easier to work with. There remains the thermodynamically inescapable fact that petroleum products (gasoline, diesel, kerosene, etc.) have a much higher energy density than you can get from propane, methane et al, and there's the infrastructure cost of providing places for these vehicles to fuel, so oil is not going away just yet.

So the oil needs to come from somewhere, and the Oil Sands are close and friendly to the US. This is as opposed to (for example) Venezuela which is arguably closer, depending on the refinery, but not (presently) friendly and we're talking tankers. While I'm on the subject of tankers, they don't seem to be the menace you'd assume them to be, but they get a lot of press due to the impressive swath of oily mess they cause. Leaky pipelines are typically unspectacular, although your groundwater may feel differently. This brings us back to the NIMBY problem which brought this to you today, and the current US administration's hostility to "Drill, baby, drill!"

Countries have no permanent Friends and no permanent Enemies, only permanent Interests. I really don't want to think too much about what happens if Canada is no longer friends with the US (although the words Manifest Destiny pop into my head), but if their money has to go somewhere, at least they can be certain we're not financing terrorist groups with it. They need Oil, and we have oil, so it should work out. However if it doesn't, China ALSO needs oil; if the Americans get too wrapped around the axle about how "dirty" the oil is, I'll happily sell to whoever wants to buy.

Economics are a permanent Interest for all concerned. Well, not all; those protesters (especially the "celebrity" ones) have a very narrow focus and keeping the economy moving is not part of it. This is the crux of the issue, balance and Risk Assessment. In the "pro" column is security of supply. In the "con" there is cost and environmental risk. "Con" is here as objective as possible and takes ideology out of it as much as possible; in this day and age ignoring the environmental potential of something is not an option, but the number of variables that encompasses is a matter of ideology.

How this balances out depends (as always) on where you put the weight. Since I have no skin in the game I come down on the side of "build it", assuming that it is done properly. This is for simple geopolitical and economic reasons, both serviced by the "pro", and my caveats cover (to my satisfaction) the "con". I realize that you will feel differently if it's going through your fields or aquifer and I have no pat response to that, but Darryl Hanna and the rest of them still annoy me, mostly because it's another bandwagon for them.

Here's some more of my ideology at work: all of this is happening because nuclear energy has not been supported and developed. Tripling the output of conventional fission plants could provide all of the energy the US currently gets from coal, accomplishing Obama's goal of driving coal plants out of business and cutting way back on pollution. The current fetish of blaming CO2 for all that's wrong in the world would be satisfied by that, and if they got some thorium action going they could take fossil fuels out of the generation sector entirely while ensuring domestic control of reliable energy. There'd be a boom in construction as well.

Of course this does nothing about the need to move crude to refineries, but abundant and cheap electricity could (with improved battery tech) make electric vehicles more practical, reducing the need for petrol. All of this and no need for ugly noisy unreliable wind turbines cluttering the landscape; try that, H. Boone Pickens .

Non quia aliquid consequendum

The link is to another of the inevitable elitist out-of-touch Hollywood liberals who need a bandwagon to jump on:

"I want to add my body and my voice to the thousands of others who are laying themselves on the line and saying,'No, we do not want to be party to this incredibly destructive path. We're becoming more dependent on fossil fuels and now we're becoming dependent on the most dirty of the fossil fuels, which is the tarsands fuel'," Hannah said.

TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL pipeline would run from Alberta through Nebraska to refineries in Houston and Port Arthur, Texas. It would double the capacity of the existing Keystone pipeline.

Proponents say the expansion would create thousands of jobs in both Canada and the U.S. and would help reduce U.S. reliance on Middle Eastern oil. Environmental activists say the pipeline is too risky and that extracting oil from the oilsands creates far too much greenhouse gas emissions.

Last week, the U.S. State Department released a report that said the proposed pipeline would pose no major risks to the environment and would not necessarily spur further oilsands production in Alberta.

There is nothing in life without some risk (title, in classy and hopefully correct Latin thanks to Google Translate), and no, I'm not talking about getting arrested for a sit-in against something you don't like. We are indeed "dependant on fossil fuels", but this will not change by hamstringing our productivity and prosperity. I have gone over the "alternative" energy problem before, but in short Ms Hanna has no idea what is involved in keeping the modern world's lights on if she thinks that all of our energy can be produced by "solar, wind, geothermal, microhydro" and any other pie-in-the-sky "green" options.

Those listed are only good in specific locations and/or on small scale. Solar and wind farms are as much, I'd even say more, of a blight on the landscape as any (decent) pipeline and are not reliable sources of power. Geothermal only works very locally, and you can bet that any large-scale geothermal project (in, say, Yellowstone Park) would have the Green movement's useful idiots chaining themselves to drill rigs. As for microhydro, great if you have your own river, but how many people does that apply to?

Rich people can afford whatever low-efficiency power scheme tickles their fancy; the rest of us need what works, is proven to work, will continue to work or (the future) will work better than what we already have. That last one includes "scary" things like Liquid Fluoride Reactors which will do everything we need it to do, and do it more safely than existing nuclear plants or even hydrocarbon refineries. I would have one in my backyard, or at least where I could see it from there (it's still a powerplant after all) but the Greens would shit themselves at the name of it alone.

In the meantime, the USA needs to get back on its' feet economically and politically, and affordable secure energy is one brick on that path. Celebrities making responsible, informed announcements/actions would help in a small way too but fat chance of that; the sensible ones seem to just keep their opinions to themselves. Cutting the size of their government by about 50% would help that immensely, but that is another post.

More Oil = Less Blood in the Levant, More in the Orient?

Today we'll see if sleeping on the revelations (see June 14's post) of massive reserves of recoverable oil in Israel has produced anything worthwhile. I don't know where I'm going with this yet, so strap in...

I am on record repeatedly here as a defender of Israel; not everything they do, but the right of the place to exist as a Jewish state. It's not a lot of real estate, it's in a (forever) rough neighbourhood, and if the Palestinian Arab recent arrivals can argue a "Right of Return", certainly Jews have priority of claim to everything west of the Jordan.

At the end of the day might makes right, and the Israelis have been a lot more restrained than I would have been facing a group of people who wanted (and repeatedly tried) to wipe my people from the earth. The fact that there are Palestinians still in the West Bank and Gaza is proof of that restraint, with all of the attendant misery on both sides that has come from it. A lot of that restraint, as mentioned in the FP article I referenced, comes from skittish Westerners scared of pissing off the Arabs.

I can't imagine that 2,000 years of anti-Jewish sentiment will disappear from Europe if Israel can suddenly supply them with petroleum, but it is to be hoped that more rationality could result. More interesting to me is the effect of this sort of sustainable windfall on Israel's security policy.

Americans are not entirely enamoured of the amount of money their country sends to Israel every year. I could add that a similar amount of money (c. $2B/y) has been going to Pakistan, a place that can't seriously be considered an ally of the US, but that's just for perspective. The latter is already being throttled back for being unreliable, but in any event the gravy train is over for all concerned as Uncle Sam is skint.

I will make the argument here that a more secure Israel will be a more stable bulwark in the Mid-East. They could of course go nuts and ethnically cleanse the Gaza Strip or some such, but on past practice I consider that unlikely, as justifiable as Gaza's current government would seem to make it. This is good news for the local Arab countries too, particularly their soldiers. A strong Israel with the best and most modern armed forces in the area will dissuade a future Nasser from trying again; a weakened Israel with no US support might be a tempting target and result in a bloodbath on both sides. Even worse, if Israel was facing disaster, what would stop them from nuking their tormentors?

Of course this gives energy-and-everything-else starved Egypt a motive to invade, but as noted above it ensures Israel's means to resist all comers. In short, I can't see any way in which an energy and financially secure Israel will make things worse in that part of the world. Iran could go even farther off the rails and do something crazy once they have nukes but if Pakistan hasn't let one slip yet I don't see that happening either, and payback would be the end of Iran as we know it.

Much as a certain amount of restraint was necessary during the Cold War and later during the (very) recently lapsed Pax Americana due to the ability of superpowers to do a lot of damage, weakness or perceived weakness is the trigger for invasions and other adventurism. The Americans are overstretched, so the Chinese are playing war games with their weaker neighbours over the Spratly Islands. In that case a combination of oil reserves and no strong counter to the ravenous (of resources) Chinese could plausibly lead to war with at least Vietnam and Taiwan.

This suggests to me that it's time to switch my focal point to the Far East, as that is where some real movement could take place. Pakistan or North Korea could completely collapse and China could skirmish or worse with many of it's neighbours; yes the centre of gravity has definitely shifted. There will continue to be stuff happening in the Mid East, but I don't see much actually changing (globally) because of it. China throwing it's weight around will be QUITE different. I'm waiting to see American carrier groups defending communist Vietnam against free-market (ish) China. "The End of History" my ass.

Israel vs. OPEC?

I'll take a bit to digest this, but it's certainly a game-changer:

Financial Post June 10 2011

In the first 25 years after Israel’s founding in 1948, it was repeatedly attacked by the large armies of its Arab neighbours. Each time, Israel prevailed on the battlefield, only to have its victories rolled back by Western powers who feared losing access to Arab oilfields.
The fear was and is legitimate – Arab nations have often threatened to use their “oil weapon” against countries that support Israel and twice made good their threat through crippling OPEC oil embargoes.

But that fear, which shackles Israel to this day, may soon end. The old energy order in the Middle East is crumbling with Iran and Syria having left the Western fold and others, including Saudi Arabia, the largest of them all, in danger of doing so. Simultaneously, a new energy order is emerging to give the West some spine. In this new order, Israel is a major player.

The new energy order is founded on rock – the shale that traps vast stores of energy in deposits around the world. One of the largest deposits – 250 billion barrels of oil in Israel’s Shfela basin, comparable to Saudi Arabia’s entire reserves of 260 billion barrels of oil – has until now been unexploited, partly because the technology required has been expensive, mostly because the multinational oil companies that have the technology fear offending Muslims. “None of the major oil companies are willing to do business in Israel because they don’t want to be cut off from the Mideast supply of oil,” explains Howard Jonas, CEO of IDT, the U.S. company that owns the Shfela concession through its subsidiary, Israel Energy Initiatives. Jonas, an ardent Zionist, considers the Shfela deposit merely a beginning: “We believe that under Israel is more oil than under Saudi Arabia. There may be as much as half a trillion barrels.”

What if Western foreign policy was freed from fear of another OPEC embargo? Admittedly that scenario is fantastically unlikely as things stand presently, but if it's happened once it (or something very similar) can happen again. More importantly, what happens if Israel no longer needs the USA?

Anyway, this requires some thought so I'll come back to it when I have more time; in the meantime I leave it as a mental exercise for the reader

More power to us

Petrol prices being unreasonably high again, it seems a good time to get into a ramble about how we will continue to support an advanced technological society. If it was easy everyone would be doing it, but it seems that salvaging a decent standard of living for our kids and grand kids will take some work and imagination.

For the moment, oil rules the energy world. It is abundant (Peak Oil pundits notwithstanding), and the most easily transported source of dense energy, but the sky is not blue for consumers and the economy. Yes we have lots of it, but what we're running out of is cheap, easy to get oil. If the Abiogenic Oil hypothesis is correct it may be renewable, but not on any timescale that will help us so that's largely irrelevant even it happens.

The Alberta Oil Sands were "mothballed" for years because the price of oil was too low for them to be commercially viable. The fact that they're being worked in a big way today is proof that the days of cheap oil are over. That said the current high prices (c.$1.25/L) at the pumps are mostly speculation, and such high prices at the sharp end are not justified on the supply side.

The cost of transport going up over 20% in the last year has placed great inflationary pressure on individuals and businesses which in turn sets off a vicious circle of higher prices for everything and less discretionary spending. It also increases costs for government operations (fire, police, military, etc.) and lessens the amount of sales tax they (fed and provincial/state) pull in. At the municipal level it means higher property taxes, further eroding spending power.

I hope those examples suffice to make my point, which is: Cheap Energy is the Key to Prosperity. Prosperity is fundamental to the kinder gentler welfare states we try to pull off, so wherever you fall on the political spectrum/Venn diagram you should be in favour of prosperity. The news to a lot of people seems to be that the money for policies has to come from somewhere (that would be you on the Left), and squeezing the taxpayers is a process of rapidly diminishing returns. You do indeed run out of other peoples' money...

The good news is that as long as we can keep the clueless Luddite environmentalists at bay we have clean sustainable options. I will go on record here as saying that wind turbines are NOT included in this, as they are worse than useless for large-scale power generation, kill birds and bats in huge swathes, blight the landscape and very possibly make people ill with the vibrations they cause. Not in MY backyard; I'd rather have a nice quiet thorium power plant.

Fear ruins so much of what we might accomplish. The radiation bogeyman easily has people shitting their pants even when there is no massive disaster to give them something to be concerned about. This is obviously an allusion to the Daiichi reactor incidents. The earthquake which precipitated the tsunami which overwhelmed the redundant safety features on those 40+ year-old designs was massive, and there are limits to engineering.

Lessons had been learned since those plants were designed and even more can be done; after all that natural disaster killed over 18,000 people and destroyed billions of any unit of currency in property. The radiation from the leaks hasn't killed anyone to date and even if (IF!) a few die of cancer a few years early that's still a formidable safety record even in failure considering the forces and substances involved.

More (smaller, better designed) fission plants, check. The Grail of nuclear energy is fusion power, but that is perennially "30 years away" so I'll disregard it. I've mentioned it before, but our best option to replace everything we don't like (read: coal) is some form of Thorium reactor. We have lots of it, the technology needs tweaking but is within the state of the art and it's as safe as anything involving toxic metals at high temperatures can be. That sounds flippant, but they can't explode or melt down, so any accident would be an industrial one and do a lot less damage than say a refinery explosion.

Sold; when do we get them? What else? Space-based solar would be great but I don't see it happening even in my lifetime. Ground solar is not yet efficient enough to offset it's cost and the fact that the sun isn't always shining on you, but improvement continues. If battery tech can advance with them we'll have worthwhile home systems, at least for those who can afford it.

This comes back to the "cheap" part of the energy question. Every dollar that you need to spend on energy in any form is money you don't have to keep businesses going, keeping people employed, keeping taxes going to fix your roads, etc., etc. Spending $50K to wean yourself off the fickle (where I live anyway) grid with solar power will take a long time to pay off. Think of the economics of the current generation of hybrid and electric cars; less at the pump, sure, but how much gas could you buy with the extra you spent for the low-rate production semi-experimental vehicle you're driving?

Again with the "no free lunches". I don't see a lot of political leadership which either thinks things all the way through or encourages the public to do so, I guess that's why I keep doing this. Start working on Thorium power now, not in 20 years when we'll have needed it for 10. Go ahead political leaders, surprise me and actually do something with legitimate foresight.

Too smart for our own good

I have threatened to write about Energy Policy, but before I get into the nuts and bolts of that (superficially at least) I want to say something about ideas and ideology.

I regard myself as a conservative, but this does not mean that I am a slavish follower of Rush Limbaugh or Anne Coulter, or to be more local, believe that Stephen Harper can do no wrong. Conservative, to me, means someone who likes what is proven to work and adopts new things because they will work too. Not "should" work, WILL work; chances need to be taken from time-to-time, but not with everything, and not "just because" or for the sake of Change.

The worst possible reason to do anything is for Good Intentions. This I see as the key dividing line between liberals and conservatives. Conservatives will do something to achieve a set goal, liberals are prone to big picture stuff that runs counter to typical human interests or responses. It's also a key reason that liberals commonly attack their opponents as not being very intelligent. Sarah Palin is an excellent current example of this. Sarah is no Rhodes Scholar (aside: I wonder how many of the lefty recipients of that even know who Cecil Rhodes was and what he stood for?) but neither is 99.99% of the rest of the population.

True disasters are the province of the 99th percentile of brainiacs, so a MENSA card is not in my books a prerequisite for political office. You do need to be clever enough to develop and defend your ideas, but an IQ of 125-140 will allow you to do that as long as you're willing to work a bit harder than the more "gifted".

Sarah looks great on TV, but does she really have the "optimal" brain power for the job she may or may not be seeking? I have no idea (I honestly suspect "no") but she DOES connect to a lot of regular people. The elites hate her of course, but she strikes me as a practical sort for the most part, and politics needs more people who want to make things work and less lawyers who want to change things. One thing I am certain of is that Sarah Palin could not be more of a disaster in the White House than the much "smarter" Barack Obama.

What the hell does this have to do with energy policy? Any planning will be done by the government of the day and ideology plays into it. Sarah Palin's "drill baby, drill" is about keeping the lights on, something that conservatives tend to be big on. Obama has hobbled domestic energy production and intends to do as much more of it as he can through cap and trade, etc. His positions are ideological (thank you, big brains), not practical

Sixty percent of Canadian voters are not happy about the Conservative majority government we currently have, but this government will ensure that nothing overly progressive happens to our economy, and that is both the basis and necessity for establishing a sustainable cheap energy future. Anyone who doesn't support that outcome is either too stupid to have a worthwhile opinion or too "clever" for our/their own good.

Conservatives know that there are no free lunches, and liberals/socialists expect someone else to pay for theirs. With the latter group neutralized for the time being, hopefully some productive work can get done. What I think that means is (probably, what do you want for free?) next.

Earth Hour is Bullshit

This will be quick but topical, with Dirt Hour tomorrow. Turning off your lights for an hour is completely pointless from an environmental standpoint, and anything you could do that would make a significant contribution to lessening electricity demand would drastically reduce your standard of living.

The rising cost of everything is doing a good job of that already, and energy costs are the biggest part of it. Turn off all of your lights for the hour if you want, but I challenge anyone to convince me that it will make any difference to anything. The link shows base load and peak power output, and Earth Day is more likely to put a strain on the system when everyone turns their lights back on at the same time than anything else.