Thursday, April 16, 2009
Six years away from an energy crisis
So says Dieter Helm. The interesting thing is, I don't think he's said anything we haven't written on this blog – many times.
Perhaps the only area of uncertainty is the timing. Helm relies on the coal plants which have not opted out from the EU's large combustion plant directive. He expects them to continue in production until 2015.
However, as plants approach the end of their economic lives, operators will be increasingly reluctant to commit funds to preventative maintenance and repairs. Thus, as we get closer to 2015, the chance of a catastrophic breakdown in a large power station increases.
The existing nukes are similarly affected. With the current estate in a poor condition, the possibility of cumulative failure cannot be ruled out, in which case the date of 2015 set by Helm should be regarded as the most optimistic scenario.
He does not expect any new nuclear power station to come on stream until 2020, which gives us – at the very least – a five-year gap before we reach a more stable supply situation.
Helm also notes the current dash for gas and, like us, has reservations as to whether a supply of gas can be maintained. And, if it is, there will be a very significant price penalty as more and more nations compete for available supplies.
Electorally, putting the crisis six years ahead would place it at the start of the second term of a Conservative administration – i.e., after the next but one general election, with increasing grid instability before that. That takes it out of the equation for the coming election, which means that both parties can continue to ignore it.
The reckoning, when it comes – and it really is "when" – is too far ahead for politicians to factor in to current electoral strategies. However, Helm argues that the only way to prevent major power shortages is to keep economic activity suppressed, preventing rather than encouraging a recovery.
That could give the next election campaign an interesting twist. We would need to vote for the party least likely to engineer a rapid economic recovery. Tough call, that one.
COMMENT THREAD
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
If we can't hack it …
What was once solely a British area of responsibility is no longer. In March 2006 British troops deployed to Helmand province in southern Afghanistan, with a view to imposing stability and bringing reconstruction.
Not only have they failed, the situation has become so tenuous that, increasingly, US troops are taking over, fighting for towns and territories that we have failed to capture or have lost.
Starting in December 2007, the US provided the bulk of the troops and most of the air assets to re-take Musa Qala. In April 2008, US Marines then re-took the town of Garmsir and now, having been effectively abandoned by the British in 2007, this month US Marines re-took the district town of Now Zad.
More on Defence of the Realm.
Chasing their own tails
Did you know that "Europe" has not just been the most successful peace process ever (Denmark not having invaded Holland for some time) but has alos advanced the cause of democracy eastward and "removed the shackles of communism"? You did not? I thought everyone knew that. After all, that is what we were told by the Former British Soldier, Robin Matthews, who is also leader of Libertas in the UK (though, obviously not of Libertas.uk) and a prospective candidate for the Toy Parliament in the South-West.
He was introducing the London list- six prospective candidates, all people, as he explained after giving a ringing endorsement to the European project, which has, alas, gone astray, with experience in life and enthusiasm. Apparently, knowledge of anything to do with the EU or the Toy Parliament or, even, of basic history is not required. In fact, it might be a disadvantage. You wouldn't want the regional candidates to know more than the UK leader.
More on that launch with a dire prediction about any possibility of continuing sanity in the author over on EUReferendum2. Enjoy.
Opportunity cost
It will come as little surprise to most readers to learn that newspapers have a limited number of pages, particularly when it comes to the news and comment sections. Equally, there are limits set on broadcast news slots, which cannot be of infinite length.
Once this stunning information is fully absorbed, however, it becomes a fairly simple matter to deduce that, should bulletins or news pages be packed with details of one issue, other material must be left out.
What is less understood is that the ability to decide what should be published – and therefore what is left out – is the greatest power exercised by the MSM. By pursuing one issue and giving it great prominence, the collective can set the agenda and, by not publishing other material, issues which might otherwise have been prominent are consigned to obscurity.
Potentially, the greatest value of the internet was to break this monopoly of power. On the one hand, through the miracle of the search engine, it gave ordinary people high speed access to a huge range of material, historical and contemporary, negating the advantage of the media organisations and their hitherto better access to information.
On the other, particularly through the medium of blogging, it gave unprecedented access to a wide range of people, to disseminate information and analysis and promote discussion.
In theory, that should have led to an explosion in both the variety and depth of discussion, possibly leading to a better-informed, better-educated and sophisticated population, taking advantage of the leap in technology akin to the appearance of the printing press which challenged the monopoly of the clergy over the written word.
Alas, it was not to be. Possibly because of the inherent herd mentality of our species, rather than variety and depth, we see an explosion of sameness – simply more people chewing over the same issues. Many of the issues which were previously ignored by the media are now simply ignored by a larger number of people.
That said, it is of course possible to entertain more than one issue at a time, and it is a wholesome characteristic of our species that we can accommodate the serious, the important, the humorous and the trivial, all mixed in together as part of our daily intake of information.
The tragedy comes when the single issue – the hystèrie du jour - plus the trivia serve to drive out the rest, to the extent that issues of some considerable importance go entirely unreported and thus unexamined.
Put differently, the narrow focus on a limited range of issues has a cost – what might be called an "opportunity cost" - which we pay and pay dearly without even recognising.
By way of example, we see in today's Guardian the second of a series on the Iraqi war, which retails in great detail a savage attack on British troops, following on from a piece yesterday which offered similar detail. The point here is that the newspaper is offering details of events which occurred in the summer of 2006, events which at the time were almost completely unreported.
It is the thesis in my book Ministry of Defeat that had we known at the time quite how badly the security situation had deteriorated, Blair would not have been able to get away with his studied deception, maintaining that conditions were improving, in order to engineer a swift extraction of British troops.
Had that been the case, proper resources might have been allocated to what was a major insurgency, it is arguable than many lives might have been saved and many people spared much misery – and the consequences of our ignominious defeat could have been avoided.
That it was not covered by the British media should be a lasting indictment of the fourth estate. But it was covered to an extent by the foreign media and certainly by the local Arab (English language) media. The gap left by the British media could have been filled by bloggers. We (EU Ref) are just as guilty as the rest, for we did not even begin to wake up to the growing disaster in Iraq until the following year and it was 2006 before we got into our stride.
This, though, is not just history. Exactly the same is happening in Afghanistan. We really would not know it from the media coverage, but there is a major war going on out there. Less than two weeks ago, US forces launched a major military operation in the British sector in a town called Now Zad, to the west of Musa Qala, to recover it from the Taleban after it had been abandoned by our forces in 2006.
For many different reasons, which we will explore in a separate post onDefence of the Realm, this was (and is) an important event – the operation is ongoing, the fighting having trashed the town (see picture above). But, as for British media coverage, there is none. The most recent defence piece we got in the famous Daily Telegraph was a non-story about an alleged "manpower crisis" in the RAF.
If the Iraq debacle is any guide, the neglect of events in Afghanistan – which are of direct strategic and national interest, whether you agree with the war or not – will have its cost. That is the "opportunity cost" which we will all have to pay (and some will pay with their lives). If bloggers – and blogging – are to be taken seriously, they must address such issues, and many more. Otherwise, we are just as venal as the MSM which we so despise.
Or do we leave serious blogging (as well as the fighting) to the Americans?
COMMENT THREAD
Hypocrisy?
The EU, we are told, has started legal action against the UK for not applying EU data privacy rules that would restrict the Phorm Internet advertising tracker. This is a system that electronically tags web users who visit certain sites, those tags then being used to trigger adverts relevant to that user's interests.
The system does not actually store any personal data and nor is a record kept of sites visited, which is why inSeptember last year the British government gave it a clean bill of health. Phorm's search terms, said the British government, had been widely drawn so they did not reveal a user's identity and the company had no information which would enable it to link a user ID and profile to a living individual.
However, the EU commission begs to differ and, since it is our supreme government, it is calling the shots, demanding that the system should be prohibited unless users give explicit consent to having their behaviour tracked and analysed.
In due course, this will probably go to the supreme court in Luxembourg and the puppet government in Whitehall will roll over and do as it is told, whatever the merits or otherwise of the case. The mandarins and ministers are no longer in charge.
There is, though, something of a whiff of hypocrisy in this. Only last week, the EU's Data Retention Directive came into force in the UK.
The Regulations require that "Public Communications Service Providers" are obliged to retain "communications data" including the date and time of the log-in or log-off of every internet user. They must also keep a record of the IP address allocated by the internet access service provider and the user ID of the subscriber or registered user of the internet access service. Any or all of this information must be made available to the authorities on request.
Thus, we have an interesting situation where a commercial firm which wants to make use of anonymous information is prohibited from doing so, while the authorities are allowed free access to key information that will enable identities to be established and user patterns monitored.
Nor even does this inconsistency stop there. The commission is also warning about radio frequency identification, or RFID, tags that can be used as an electronic label on clothing or food to pass on information such as expiry dates or prices to a store cashier or stock checker. "No European should carry a chip in one of their possessions without being informed precisely what they are used for, with the choice to remove or switch it off at any time," says information commissioner Viviane Reding.
But where does that put local authorities who secretly tag dustbins to monitor household waste generation? Are we back with one rule for us, and one rule for them? Shurly shum mishtake?
COMMENT THREAD
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Clever!
We could use one of these for EU Ref. It would save me having to craft those carefully honed phrases.
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