Wednesday 2 May 2012 Wednesday 2 May 2012 Wednesday 2 May 2012 Tuesday 1 May 2012 He was a troubled individual of great wit and intellect and a well rounded person. He was a gifted physicist, programmer and accomplished glider pilot, among many other hidden talents. He was hugely influential to those who knew him, and for all his quirks, he was a warm, funny and sincere person. Tuesday 1 May 2012
A failure of policy
Currently, that is enough capacity to supply water for four months if there was no rainfall at all, and groundwater and river abstraction was to stop completely for that period. Experience demonstrates that this is not enough.
However, no-one but a congenital Tory Boy would raise the issue of "building loads more reservoirs that we will only need once every 100 years". That is not on the cards.
On the other hand, it is entirely reasonable to work on the basis of a 25 year cycle, which is the industry standard for assessment – and a legal requirement under the Water Act 2003. And to deal with this, and the increase in population, plus "security of supply in the face of climate change", in 2004 new reservoirs were very much on the agenda.
Potential shortages had been well-flagged, and even this was leaving it rather late – the following year, there was a major drought in the southeast, when we were getting exactly the same headlines as we are now.
Thus, by July 2007, the trade journal Global water intelligence was reporting that there were 666 reservoirs in the UK "and rising". To overcome the perennial problem of water shortages, five major new reservoir projects had been thought necessary, plus three large extensions to existing reservoirs. This was not an academic project. Outline plans had been set out in the water companies' 25-year water resources plans prepared in 2004.
One of those planned was the Abingdon reservoir, and the fate of that has already been recorded. Another had been announced in September 2003 – the Clay Hill reservoir near Canterbury in Kent, to be built at a cost of £100m. And it was to be joined by a huge reservoir at Broad Oak, near Folkestone. Both, however, have been deferred, one to 2020 and the other to 2023.
Yet another was Havant Thicket, a £36m project between Havant and Rowlands Castle, near Portsmouth. But, in November 2011, it was announced that this was to be deferred for 25 years, after the government told Portsmouth Water to go back to the drawing board in devising its Water Resources Management Plan.
Of the five in the planning stage in 2004, that left the Lower Severn reservoir, in the Severn Trent Water area. And there has been no progress here either: in 2010, this was still under discussion, with no construction plans having been made public.
Thus, none of the five reservoirs deemed essential in 2004 – all in the south of England – have seen the light of day. And neither have the three reservoir extensions, although one, the Abberton Reservoir enhancement, in Essex, is due to come on-stream in 2014. That aside, in the twenty yearssince 1992, the only new major public water supply reservoir, owned by a water company, to become operational is Severn Trent Water's Carsington reservoir.
There is absolutely no question that the lack of building has been government-inspired. Each time a water company has got its plans to a working stage, they have been rejected by government planning inspectors, with the obvious approval of ministers, right up to and including Caroline Spelman.
And now we are reaping the predictable and predicted effects.
COMMENT: "WHELK STALL" THREAD
Richard North 02/05/2012 Not fit to run a whelk stall
In suggesting this, she quietly glosses over the fact that official climate change projections are for "little change in the amount of precipitation" but that "it is likely that more of it will fall in the winter, with drier summers, for much of the UK". The warmists have got their projections completely wrong. The rainfall pattern is the opposite of that predicted.
The water companies, however, have not been entirely wrong in their projections. Hence, in 2006 Thames Water was saying that customer demand was also expected to rocket over the next three decades, on top of a predicted population increase of 800,000 for London. A new reservoir was needed or customers would "face an increased risk in hosepipe bans and water restrictions", it said.
Needless to say, the plan was rejected by the egregious Caroline Spelman who decided that there was "no immediate need" for such a site - largely based on the idea that people would respond to her nagging and reduce per capita water consumption. Thus, her way of dealing with storage shortfalls is simply to instruct us to use less water.
What all this conceals – and is intended to conceal – is a massive failure in strategic planning, on a par with the failure to ensure adequate energy supplies. In two recent reports, one on water supplyand the other on infrastructure, there is no recognition whatsoever of the need for more storage capacity. Instead, we see the focus on "water efficiency", with Spelman lecturing us on how our "attittudes" to water must change.
In the infrastructure report, we see the statement that "increases in population will put more pressure on our water supplies", although nothing is said of the population having already increased by eleven percent since privatisation, with no increase in storage capacity.
"Britain's infrastructure will be made fit for the 21st century", said the preposterous George Osborne at the time, in signing the report. Instead, as the water infrastructure fails, we are now told to save water. It is all our fault, the government would have us believe, dumping the responsibility for its failures on our lap.
Yet, while the media are just beginning to realise what is going on, the bulk of the politico-media establishment is still obsessed with the Murdoch soap opera and sundry irrelevancies. It needs to start focusing on the more important issues, bringing an executive to book for multiple failures that go back decades.
As it stands, we are looking at a government which is presiding over the lights going out and the taps running dry. Murdoch may or may not be fit to run a television station but of far more importance is the increasing evidence that government is not fit to run a whelk stall.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 02/05/2012 A matter of indifference
People are in a funny mood, and while many are sick to the teeth of Cameron and his Tories, they are not ready to rush out and note for Miliband. And nor will they vote in their droves for UKIP or another minority party.
What is going to predominate on Thursday, then, is indifference. Typically, we will be seeing turnouts in the thirty percent region, or less, which means that councillors will be getting elected on the votes of ten percent of the electorate. That is already happening in by-elections for MPs, and the trend will be more evident with the locals.
This, in turn, makes a nonsense of the earnest analysis that we have seen of late, with clever-clogs think-tanks purporting to tell us something of the political attitudes of today. But, of those who know anything of grass-roots politics, it matters not whether voters are in the north or south, east or west. The predominant attitude is indifference. That is not apathy. People do care, but the majority are indifferent to the messages offered by the established political parties.
Like performing seals, if they are called upon to give vent in focus group, people can entertain their questioners with legends of what they might do, if they could be bothered to vote. But the majority – the vast majority – do not vote.
Confronted with political parties that are so much hot air, parties which – as Mullen says – have alienated their core supporters (all of them, not just the Tories), they see no point whatsoever in partaking in the voting process. Most feel that their votes will not make the slightest bit of difference. Largely, they are right.
The media, of course, is as bad as the politicians. What interests them, such as the Murdoch saga, is also largely a matter of indifference to the majority of people. Like the politicians, the hacks have spiralled off into a planet of their own, leaving their readers stranded.
Only the political classes and their media groupies now find anything of interest in the current party political agendas. For the rest of us, politics is not even a spectator sport. One does not watch the TV news any more. One looks at it – in amazement. And the party political broadcasts are no longer even vaguely amusing.
Mullen thus asks why anyone should vote for Dave's Tory party. But he is an exception. Most people don't even go that far. They don't bother asking the question. There is no need to ask. Party politics is a tedious game for a diminishing minority. It has nothing to do with real people.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 02/05/2012 Sandy Rham
It is my sad duty to report that our forum member and good friend Sandy Rham passed away yesterday. We do not as yet know the exact circumstances but he is said to have passed away in his sleep.Sandy was instrumental in the creation of our forum and has been a valued advisor and contributor to this blog, as well as an exceptional friend to me. He has influenced us greatly.
The last time I saw him, he read the following poem to me. He spoke the words with knowing.Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.
Up, up the long, delirious burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or ever eagle flew
And, while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.
John Gillespie Magee, Jr
COMMENT THREAD
Peter North 01/05/2012 Boeing buys Airbus
Airbus itself has agreed to take the other five A-340s (type pictured above), making up the rest of the fleet, this being a part-exchange deal for the sale of 15 A-330 passenger aircraft.
China Eastern, which is disposing of the A-340s, says it is getting rid of these aircraft because they are expensive to operate and have "relatively weak route competitiveness." Worth about $700 million, according to China Eastern, they have an average age of about 8.3 years.
What makes this especially interesting, though, is that the Boeing deal might have been facilitated by the recent spat over the EU tax on airline CO2 emissions, with rumours that the Chinese government is blocking its national airlines from buying Airbus products.
If this is the case, it will be yet another example of the green agenda costing jobs, and in this case political influence as well. The EU sets great store by being able to call China its "strategic partner", and Airbus sales were a strong symbol of that relationship.
If the EU now persists in pursuing its airline tax, it will go a long way towards making sure that the bulk of the CO2 emissions produced by non-European airlines come from Boeing aircraft, while China drifts ever closer into the US camp.
The greenies have a lot to answer for.
COMMENT THREAD
Richard North 01/05/2012
Wednesday, 2 May 2012
Some 17,395,000,000 litres or nearly four billion gallons of water a day (1,411 billion gallons a year)go in to the UK mains water supply. As back-up, there is a capacity to store about 520 billion gallons in above-ground reservoirs, representing about 36 percent of the annual supply.
Despite this, there has been no specific declaration by successive governments, opposing the building of reservoirs. Simply, with just one exception, it has not happened – the climate nannies are pursuing instead a policy of reduced water consumption, in line with its more general climate change mitigation strategy.
The idiot Caroline Spelman - a woman famed for her stupidity - is now telling us that, even after the wettest April for more than 100 years, if the country "endured" another dry winter the desperate measure would be "more likely" next year.
The last place one might have expected to see this was in the Failygraph, and I'm not even sure that the Rev Dr Peter Mullen is right – that the Tories will necessarily get a drubbing on Thursday.
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