Unsustainable combustion - by Richard... Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Unsustainable combustion - by Richard... Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Although the Daily Mail does the Tibury power plant fire big, the one thing it does not mention is spontaneous combustion.

Opened in 1969, Tilbury previously operated as a coal-fired power station but has been converted to generate power from 100 percent sustainable biomass until its scheduled closure at the end of 2015. Now on fire, the seat was reported to be 4-6,000 tons of biomass in a wood pellet hopper high up in the power station building.

It is left to Bloomberg to raise the prospect of spontaneous combustion, as this is the most likely cause of the fire. The agency cites Claire Curry, a bioenergy analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance. She says: "If biomass is stored in large volumes, with little aeration, it is very likely to catch fire as it can get very hot. Normally biomass plants will pass streams of cool air through the biomass to avoid fires happening".

So hazardous are large quantities of stored biomass that it is a reasonable proposition to argue that no large plant is likely to run through to its end of expected life without a serious fire.

Yet the UK is seeking to get 15 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020, of which DECC estimates as much as half of that may be generated from biomass. And so popular is the option that burning of wood and wood waste for energy in the UK rose eight percent to 648,000 tons of oil equivalent in 2010 from 598,000 tons in 2009.

The trouble is though that, as the Tilbury fire has demonstrated, the process is anything but sustainable. It seems we have a case here of unsustainable combustion, and yet another black mark for the greenies.

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No surprise then - by Richard... Monday, February 27, 2012

The Bundestag has overwhelmingly endorsed the second Greek bailout, 496 to 90, despite growing pressure from voters and the media, while Merkel admits there is no guarantee that it will work. "Europe will fail if the euro fails. Europe wins if it wins the euro", she warns.

This comes as absolutely no surprise. Despite some predictions to the contrary, it is too early yet to cut Greece adrift. Wait for the fall.

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Reynolds News - by Richard...

I spent some time at Bradford University this afternoon, reading copies of Reynolds News from 1940. This important newspaper was, at the time, owned by the Co-operative Society, and reflected a strand of left-wing thought which is rarely given much of an airing today.

One of the reasons it has been airbrushed out of history is that there are only two complete collections in the country (and, therefore, the world). One is in Hendon, and the other in Bradford, on my doorstep. Neither collection has been indexed or microfilmed, and the papers can only be viewed by appointment, under supervision.

Typically, historians rely on the newspaper of record, The Times, and then tend only to look at the headlines on the main news page. Although that newspaper didn't then have a front page as such (it was used for adverts), I call this "front-page-itis", a disease that gives a very limited, establishment view of the world. Those who then also rely on official records thus tend to write establishment histories, which present an extremely distorted account of the battle.

By contrast, Reynolds News, with the slogan, "Government of the People, by the People, for the People" is a treasure house, a superb representation of left-wing views. As such, it conveys its own distortions but is probably more representative of what the bulk of people were thinking - and hugely influential as well. Time and time again, the paper has set the agenda, invoking responses in the War Cabinet and other newspapers.

Especially for Witterings from Witney, we have an extract from a delightful opinion piece by professor A Berriedale Keith (a well-known constitutional lawyer of his time), written on 21 July 1940. This column was on the theme, "Battle for Ideas", headlined, "Let Public Opinion Have its Say".

The Prof was writing about the utility of opinion polls (then very novel), telling us that, of MPs: "... we have long outlived the idea that at an electoral contest we confer unlimited authority on the member we elect", then going on to say that: "It is the business of an MP to keep in touch with public opinion, and not humbly to obey the bidding of the whips".

This, and other such delights, I shall feed into an updated version of this blog, the detail standing to confirm and strengthen the thesis offered in the book, that the Battle of Britain was part of the People's War, and won by the fortitude of the people as a whole.

The paper defined the battle on 15 September 1940, seven days into the Blitz of London - on which anniversary we now celebrate Battle of Britain Day: "Göring's 'blitzkrieg' on London", it said, "has a dual object: first to smash communications and disorganise public services in the Capital, and second to confront the Government with the problem of a demoralised and panic-stricken population".

In this, the paper wrote, Göring failed, then declaring: "The story of the bombardment of London is the story of the people's success", adding: "What stands out is the heroism and quickness and common humanity of the ordinary people ...".

This takes nothing from the bravery of the RAF pilots, and changes nothing in history - only our perception of it. The establishment has claimed the victory for its favoured elite, but it was the people's victory as well, in a continuous battle that ended not in October 1940 but went on until the following May 1941.

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Winning the battles – losing the war - by Richard...

The Weekly Standard - much cited elsewhere, is running a piece telling us why the climate sceptics (or "deniers") are winning. And indeed, they probably are – they have never really recovered from Climategate 1, and all the other "gates" that piled in on top of it.

It is said of the British, however, that we tend to lose all our battles except that last, thus winning the war. Climate sceptics, on the other hand, now seem to be in danger of reversing this process – winning the battles but losing the war.

This thesis is tried out in an important piece by Autonomous Mind who notes that the battle over climate science is by-and-large meaningless. The climate agenda, he says, is but one front in a much broader campaign involving the centralisation of power, the erosion of democracy and liberty and the transfer of wealth.

Thus says AM, no matter what the "science" reveals and how much it is debunked, there will always be another line of attack from the sustainability playbook to further the political – and economic corporatist – agenda. On that front is where the battle needs to be fought, not in the theatre of carbon dioxide emissions, raw and adjusted data or fractions of a degree of temperature change.

Exactly the same sentiment is reflected in a report by Dennis Ambler.

Whilst the continual scientific rebuttals of the climate reports produced by the IPCC may make many people think that this charade cannot continue much longer, behind the scenes it is quite irrelevant, he writes. The long-term process marches relentlessly on as if there had never been any challenges at all.

As the advocates throw in yet more spurious claims of the "hottest year on record", or record cold caused by CO2 emissions, they occupy the debate, and determine the daily agenda in the media, whilst those who know that the claims are spurious, are driven to waste time, effort and resources on refuting them.

Further evidence supporting this thesis comes from our continued trawl of the Hewlett Foundationgrant database (above). This throws us some interesting data about the Bipartisan Policy Center, which started in 2002 under the aegis of Senators Tom Daschle, Bob Dole, George Mitchell and Howard Baker.

Having evolved from the National Commission on Energy Policy, it claims to be a bipartisan group of twenty of the nation's leading energy experts representing the highest ranks of industry, government, academia, labour, consumer and environmental protection.

But what makes it so interesting is that it ranks amongst the beneficiaries of the Hewlett Foundation, as seeking to promote climate change policy - advising Congress, the Executive Branch, States and other policymakers regarding long-term US policy. For that, it has received $42.85 million, having in 2009 pushed strongly for climate change legislation, delivering a major report on the issue.
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But now, against the same agenda, the main pitch is not "climate" but "energy security". Like any good strategists, this power grouping is capable of shifting the schwerpunkt when it encounters resistance in any one sector. And by such means, the climate sceptics end up winning the argument, only to find that the opposition has moved on and is fighting (and winning) a different battle.