The Quiet Road

UPDATE 20-03-2008: A significant error has been revealed in a section of the following post (relating to the amount of CO2 that would have been captured by BP’s Miller Field CCS project). For details of this error, please read the correction / apology: Oil companies and Climate Change Redux. For the calculation estimating the quantity of CO2 emitted by a single barrel of oil, please see: Carbon dioxide emissions per barrel of crude.

This article, therefore, remains as merely a cautionary example about placing too much faith in published figures, and should be disregarded.

Merrick‘s writing an article about the use of hydrogen as fuel (sneak preview: he’s not uncritical of the idea. Update: here’s that article.) and encountered this particular proposal by BP. Now, while the project won’t be going ahead, the proposal itself makes fascinating reading. The basic idea goes something like this…

Instead of building a new Natural Gas power station, BP proposed to build a two-stage plant. Stage 1 would extract the hydrogen from the Natural Gas. Stage 2 would burn the hydrogen to generate electricity. The only emission from burning hydrogen is pure water. Notch one up for the fight against Climate Change, and drinks are on me! BP go so far as to claim this process results in 90% less CO2 emissions than through burning the Natural Gas directly. Which by any standards is pretty damn impressive.

Except. Well… except it’s not really. Because if you step back to Stage 1 of the process, it turns out that extracting hydrogen from Natural Gas leaves you with large amounts of waste, in the form of… you guessed it… CO2 gas. Makes you start wondering what the hell Stage 1 is actually achieving, right? But hey, chill out, all is not lost. Rather than release this CO2 into the atmosphere (which would make the whole hydrogen extraction process singularly pointless) BP instead proposed to capture it. They’d simply pump it into one of their old oil wells that was entering decline, and Bob’s your rather expensive, but nonetheless low-carbon, uncle.

You know what? As a way to reduce the carbon emissions of a Natural Gas power station, that’s really not a bad idea. The electricity produced would be a good deal more expensive (that hydrogen extraction process doesn’t come for free, energetically speaking, and nor does compressing and pumping CO2 deep underground) but it would be far less of a contributor to Climate Change. Based on the planned capacity and lifetime of the plant proposed by BP, there’d be 1.3 million tonnes of CO2 captured that would otherwise have been emitted as a result of burning Natural Gas.

I’ll go on record and state that in principle this is an interesting way to exploit Natural Gas if you are committed to using Gas in the first place*. And if that were the end of the story, this would be an article praising an oil company for getting something right. Which are few and far between in this neck of the woods.

Think like an Oil Company

But that’s not the end of the story. So I’m afraid my praise shan’t be forthcoming. BP have added a little kicker to sweeten the deal for themselves. In what is — and I say this without hyperbole — one of the most astonishing examples of Orwellian doublethink in corporate literature, this kicker appears under the heading “Industrial-scale decarbonized fuels project”:

… the carbon dioxide would be transported by an existing pipeline and injected for enhanced oil recovery and long-term geological storage in the Miller Field. Injecting the carbon dioxide into the Miller Field reservoir more than three kilometers under the seabed could extend the life of the field by about 20 years and enable additional production of about 40 million barrels of oil that are not currently recoverable.

When operational, it is planned that DF1 will create 350 megawatts of carbon-free electricity, enough to power a quarter of a million homes in the UK. The project would also permanently store 1.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of removing 300,000 cars from the roads.

Industrial-scale decarbonized fuels project

See that? The way they just slipped it in there? In return for the 1.3 million tonnes of carbon captured, they’re getting to extract 40 million barrels of oil that would otherwise have remained underground and consequently in very little danger of being converted to atmospheric CO2. Suddenly this isn’t looking like such a great deal for the environment after all. But let’s not be too hasty, how much atmospheric CO2 will be produced from 40 million barrels of oil? If it’s less than 1.3 million tonnes, then we can perhaps, albeit grudgingly, still accept the proposal as better than just burning the Natural Gas. After all, it’s not like we really expected an oil company to be doing something for the greater good. If we’re honest with ourselves, we were always looking for the ulterior motive even as we hoped against hope that it might not be there this time.

So, all that’s left is to find out how much CO2 would get emitted by 40 million barrels of oil, and we’ll know just how much this industrial-scale decarbonized fuels project is benefiting the fight against Climate Change.

It was at this point that Merrick emailed me with the question, “how much CO2 gets emitted when we consume a barrel of oil?” And it got me thinking…

How much carbon per barrel?

I’m afraid there’s no precise answer. No simple formula.

Crude oil is (almost) never used directly. Instead it’s refined into all manner of interesting chemicals, most of which we burn in various engines, but some of which never get converted into CO2 (lubricant oils, plastics, asphalt, etc.). Different grades of crude oil will produce significantly different amounts of each. So a barrel of light / sweet crude might produce lots of petrol and kerosene but only a small amount of asphalt (as a very simple example). But a barrel of heavy / sour crude would produce more asphalt (still less than the amount of petrol produced, but more in comparison with the sweeter oil). This means that, ironically, less of the heavier and more sulphuric stuff, although it’s called sour (and sometimes “dirty”) oil tends to end up as atmospheric CO2 (we coat our roads with it instead).

While we could, no doubt, work out a figure for the CO2 emitted by burning a given barrel of crude oil, it would be very much a red-herring as it almost never happens. To get any meaningful figure for CO2 emitted per barrel we’re going to need to do our calculations on the products of crude oil.

First up, let’s be clear that this is real back-of-the-fag-packet stuff and I welcome input and corrections to this calculation. That said, let’s see if we can’t get some kind of number.

The oil being discussed here is from a North Sea field, so I’m going to assume that it is at least average quality (i.e. we’re not talking about some kind of heavy sulphuric sludge or tar-sand here). Taking Riegel’s Handbook of Industrial Chemistry as our guide, we know that the average barrel (~159 litres) of crude oil to pass through U.S. refineries in 1995** yielded the following products…

1. Gasoline: 44.1% (70.12 litres)
2. Distillate fuel oil: 20.8% (33.07 litres)
3. Kerosene-type jet fuel: 9.3% (14.79 litres)
4. Residual fuel oil: 5.2% (8.27 litres)***

Percentage values from Riegel’s Handbook of Industrial Chemistry, 2003 edition (Page 515, Fig. 15.6). Litre values based upon conversion rate of 159 litres per barrel.

I’m going to be very charitable to the BP project and assume that none of the other products**** will end up as atmospheric CO2. They all have sufficient alternative uses to make this possible even if not 100% plausible. Of the four grades of fuel listed above, however, it’s fair to say all of it is destined to be burnt.

The litre values are no good to us by themselves. Each of the fuels has a different specific gravity (a different weight per litre), and it’s the weight of carbon we’re looking for, not the volume. Once we’ve multiplied the volume of each fuel by it’s specific gravity we’ll have a rough “kilogram per barrel” number for each fuel.

1. Gasoline: 70.12 litres x 0.74 = 51.89kg
2. Distillate fuel oil: 33.07 litres x 0.88 = 29.10kg
3. Kerosene-type jet fuel: 14.79 litres x 0.82 = 12.13kg
4. Residual fuel oil: 8.27 litres x 0.92 = 7.61kg*****

Overall, this suggests that the average barrel of crude refined in the United States in 1995 yielded a shade over 100kg of liquid fuels (that’s an uncannily round number… 100.73kg to be exact). Now, we know that a carbon-based fuel will emit 3.15 times its own weight in CO2 when burnt (Source: Calculating the Environmental Impact of Aviation Emissions, Oxford University Study, PDF file). This may seem anti-intuitive at first glance, but it’s a result of each atom of carbon reacting with two atoms of oxygen to produce CO2. The “extra” weight is being drawn from the air (hence why a fuel fire will die out if deprived of oxygen).

Using the 3.15 multiplier, we see that the combined liquid fuels from an average barrel of crude oil will produce roughly 317kg of CO2 when consumed. This means that 40 million barrels will produce 12,680,000,000kg. Or 12.68 million tonnes of CO2. That’s almost ten times the 1.3 million tonnes BP said would be captured.

As an attempt to reduce atmospheric CO2, it’s utterly risible. And describing it as an “industrial-scale decarbonized fuels project” is surely against some kind of trades-description legislation.

Even if this were the lowest grade North Sea crude imaginable, I’m confident that it would be producing at least 75% of the liquid fuels cited in the above “average” barrel. And if it’s higher than average quality, they might even get an extra 10%. So to be absolutely fair, we should calculate a likely range depending upon the crude. Take the 12.68 million tonnes figure, first reduce it by a quarter to get the potential minimum (9.51 million tonnes of CO2). Second increase it by 10% for the potential maximum (13.95 million tonnes of CO2).

9.51 to 13.95 million tonnes of CO2. That’s certainly a wide range, and it can’t be narrowed without knowing the specifics of the oil in question. But even the lowest number is far higher than the 1.3 million tonnes of CO2 that would have been sequestered by the project.

I’m hardly the first person to do the maths on this; surely it’s occurred to somebody at BP already. Surely they’re aware that describing the project as an “industrial-scale decarbonized fuels project” is, in every sense that actually matters, a bare-faced lie. That at a minimum, the extra oil gained in the project would emit over 7 times the CO2 as was captured.

In May 2007 BP cancelled the plan, citing governmental delays in approving the project and in providing adequate incentives. The Miller oil field is reaching the end of its life, and they needed the CO2 in a hurry to extend it. The capturing of 1.3 million tonnes of carbon was never a goal in itself; it was merely a way to falsely paint the project as a way to combat Climate Change. In doing so, BP would then be in a position to drain public money ear-marked for just that purpose (in the form of planning short-cuts, tax-relief and whatever else can be clawed from the pot to incentivise investment in carbon-reduction technologies).

Let’s be very clear about this. BP attempted to dupe the public into backing a project on the basis that it would combat Climate Change, despite (surely!) being well aware that in reality it would demonstrably increase emissions. That’s about as low, as craven… as anti-human as it’s possible to get. And while that may well be normal behaviour for a corporation, we’re complete fools if we consider it acceptable.

Sometime in the 1980s there was a flurry of concern regarding the ozone layer. I’m sure most of my readers will recall… it became the central environmental issue for a time, and the acronym ‘CFC’ entered the common vocabulary almost overnight. I remember hearing the (in all possibility, apocryphal) tale of a crazy religious woman in America who was spending a fortune on hairspray and standing on her lawn all day emptying can after can of the stuff into the air. She sought to hasten armageddon and, one supposes, her ascension into heaven. And she decided the best way to do this was to destroy the ozone layer.

It’s an image that stuck with me. A few years later I worked it into a short story (unpublished) about the public reaction to news of a genuine and demonstrable impending apocalypse. The story drew from a whole bunch of sources (most prominently, the Ziggy Stardust album) and opened with a newsreader weeping as he informed his viewers that the levels of CFCs in the atmosphere had reached a tipping point, and the outer atmosphere had begun to irreversibly burn away. That within five years, solar radiation will have rendered the entire surface of the planet uninhabitable.

The crazy religious woman, surrounded by a small mountain of empty aerosols, and generating her own toxic micro-climate, is one of the people we meet as the vengeance-fixated hero guides us through a world that is dealing with the fact of its own impending demise. One of his encounters is with a lynch-mob. A group of about five hundred people on their way to the local university. Their mission is to string up, or burn at the stake, any environmentalists they can lay their hands on. The hero watches from a distance as the college burns. And as he does so, I seem to recall he quotes Camus and pontificates on the subject of human absurdity. Poor guy had the misfortune of being written by a philosophy undergraduate.

I was reminded of that old short story by a couple of pieces in the news recently. No, the crazy lady with the aerosols hasn’t returned (though I wonder what she’s up to these days? assuming she ever existed). But it looks like the lynch-mobs might be on their way. “Blame the greens when the lights go off“, says Nick Cohen in The Guardian. And David King, the UK’s Chief Scientific Adviser for the past seven years, insists that “Greens are hurting the Climate Change fight“.

Quoting Orwell would be just too damn obvious at this point, so I’ll forego it and get straight to the name-calling.

Both Cohen and King claim that the only way to successfully combat Climate Change is to actively encourage economic growth.

Apparently we need to consume our way out of this problem. Fucking. Idiots.

Happy New Year! Let’s hope it’s a good one.

Yes, I know I’m a week late and most of you are already well into the swing of ‘Ought-Eight, but I’ve been off the grid (so to speak) for a few weeks. A strangely quiet place beyond the reach of broadband and mobile-phone signal. Eerily quiet in fact. Plenty of time for contemplation though.

Because of course, I don’t already do enough of that, right? All the same, it struck me as I looked back over the past twelve months, that from a personal standpoint, 2007 saw some fairly positive changes for me. I’m determined to keep that trend going for as long as possible… at least the next twelve months. So wish me luck on that.

Of course, just when I get a renewed sense of direction, the rest of the world seems to be going to hell. And only the most dedicated optimist would bet on humanity taking a less shambolic approach to its affairs in 2008. We could all use some of that luck I guess.

So as is traditional, before we plunge headlong into 2008, let’s cast our mind back to the best bits of 2007.

The best bits of 2007

• In politics, Tony Blair limped off into history, the influence of the neoconservatives in America seems to have entered decline, and the Progressive Democrats became a spent force in Ireland.
• It was another year in which the peace held in Northern Ireland. America didn’t invade anywhere new. Nobody nuked anybody.
• It was also the year in which Climate Change became accepted as something real enough, and important enough, to drive public policy. That this acceptance is coupled with a refusal to actually act is the flip-side of that particular “high point”.
• Culturally speaking, the best album of the year was Neon Bible by Arcade Fire (sorry to be so predictable). Other good ones… Saltbreakers by Laura Veirs, Memory Almost Full by Paul McCartney, The Projected Passion Revue by Dexy’s Midnight Runners (a re-issue of old material, but it’s classic stuff), and the Grinderman album. Oh, and check out You! Me! Dancing! by Los Campesinos! (discovering Los Campesinos! was the musical highlight of the year for me… fantastic stuff… kind of like Arcade Fire Vs. Stereolab at a Polyphonic Spree gig in Exeter… looking forward to seeing them in Dublin in February). Best gig of 2007 was Patti Smith at Vicar Street.
• Although published in 2006, I only got round to reading Pynchon’s Against The Day in 2007. That it somehow managed to exceed even my extremely high expectations is miraculous. It’s impossible to describe the sheer breadth and depth of Against The Day. “Epic” is far too small a word. And yet, despite addressing the weightiest philosophical, social and political issues imaginable; it’s also at heart a surreal adventure tale filled with funny and bizarre characters getting up to all manner of silly derring-do. Almost every line of this very long book contains something that fires sparks in my mind. Sometimes it’s an idea, sometimes a joke, sometimes a beautiful description, a sharp insight or a perfect turn of phrase. Even down to his ability to capture the psychedelic experience in print… something that’s next to impossible; perhaps only Hunter S. Thompson has ever done it as well as Pynchon does it. “Somehow the afternoon just drifted on into the dinner hour, and Lew must’ve forgot to wash his hands, because next thing he knew, he was experiencing the hotel dining room in a range of colors, not to mention cultural references, which had not been there when he came in.” So begins an hilarious trip-report which succinctly demonstrates why restaurants are not the best places to come up on powerful hallucinogens. “… the details of his “steak”, the closer he looked at that, seeming to suggest not the animal origins a fellow might reasonably expect so much as the further realms of crystallography, each section he made with his knife in fact revealing new vistas, among the intricately disposed axes and polyhedra, into the hivelike activities of a race of very small though perfectly visible inhabitants who as they seethed and bustled about, to all appearances unaware of his scrutiny, sang miniature though harmonically complex little choruses in tiny, speeded-up voices whose every word chimed out with ever-more polycrystalline luminosities of meaning.” Look, I’m sorry… I know that lots of people just don’t get Pynchon, but ever-more polycrystalline luminosities of meaning!? If that doesn’t send shivers down your spine then you just don’t know good writing. There! I said it.
• It wasn’t really the best year for movies. I’ve still not seen I’m Not There or No Country For Old Men, but I’ve heard good things about them (I’m planning to see them both over the next couple of weeks when they play at the IFI). Of the films which I did enjoy in 2007, a handful stood out… Hot Fuzz (arguably a wee bit too long, but any comedy that can deliver a solid hour of laughter gets a thumbs up), Reign Over Me (Adam Sandler doing what he does best… no, not screwball comedy, but fucked-up lonely person with severe problems), Zodiac (an average David Fincher film will always be better than most films released in a given year. And unfortunately, though it’s still an excellent film… let me emphasise that; it’s an excellent film… Zodiac is indeed quite ordinary by Fincher’s extremely high standards. That said, the sweeping shots of the bridge are some of the most amazing visuals to appear in any of his films) and The Bourne Ultimatum (OK, so I like the occasional mindless action-espionage caper. So sue me. And the Bourne films do it so very well, despite the overly-frenetic hand-held camera in this year’s installment). Aside from that, I rewatched Kurosawa and The Marx Brothers several times and probably watched The Big Sleep at least five times (making it my most watched film of 2007). Every single time I see that movie, I see something new.
• As for television; we saw the continuation of The Wire which just gets better and better. Battlestar Galactica ended the penultimate season with a Very Big Reveal indeed. And Dexter held my attention right to the end of the second season. This kind of surprised me, as a couple of the characters annoy me quite a bit. Still, the writing is very good indeed and — from a psychoanalytic standpoint — it’s by far the most interesting thing on television. Pretty much everything else on TV during 2007 was a waste of time. But it was ever thus with television. A speck of gold-dust in a planet-sized ocean of raw sewage.

The worst bits of 2007

Actually, I have no intention of dwelling on the worst bits of 2007. The fact that humanity will produce ninety-nine dreadful films for every great one, and nine-hundred and ninety-nine unlistenable albums for every one worthy of repeat-play, makes it far too time-consuming and depressing to sort out the very bad from the merely bad. In the hope that I may save some unwary reader from needlessly wasting a couple of precious hours of their life, however, let me exhort you against seeing Transformers, Shrek 3, The Reaping, Ocean’s 13, Lucky You, Next, The Fantastic-4 Sequel, and Spider-Man 3. Not a single redeeming feature among the lot.

Our culture maintained an inexorable decline into nihilism as ‘reality’ TV and vacuous celebrity fixation continued to dominate popular consciousness. Rampant consumerism got ever more rampant, and meaningless materialism ever more meaningless. Our politicians remained self-obsessed, craven and thick as pigshit for a record year running. Meanwhile, as if to demonstrate just how representative of the general populace they actually are, half a billion of us around the world became obscene voyeurs for six months as the story of a young blonde girl kidnapped in Portugal played out in the media.

And all the while The War Against Terror continued. As did The War on Drugs. And the hidden Third Great War that’s been ravaging Africa almost since the end of the last one. Oh, and let’s not forget the War Against The Planet that we’ve been waging all these years. We ramped that up a couple of notches during 2007.

And what about 2008?

Well, I don’t know what this year will bring. Climate Change and resource depletion are the twin crises facing humanity right now, but they’re unfolding over longer timescales than a single year. And for 2008, sadly, I predict continued inaction in the face of them both.

Economically I think we’re entering quite a serious recession. And it’s a downturn that may last for several years. But I don’t see it as the final gasp of consumer capitalism just yet… I get the feeling there may be one last ride left on that particular carousel. Such a seductive idea won’t die easily in the hearts and minds of we willing consumers.

In fact, I don’t hold out much hope for any significant positive change in 2008. Beyond the personal that is. For myself, I still hope for it… fall in love, finish writing at least one of those three bloody novels, qualify to work in a field that actually interests me this time! Stuff like that. And I hope the same for you too, dear reader. There’s no inherent reason why individuals can’t find personal fulfilment and achieve positive change in even the most chaotic and hostile circumstances.

For the world at large though… I fear we’ll only be capable of making the social, cultural and political changes that I believe are necessary when we’re forced into them. And for better or for worse, things aren’t likely to get bad enough in 2008 to force that change.

On the other hand, the television will be as shit as ever. And I say that with a supreme certainty. There will be a handful of albums released that make me feel glad to be alive, and perhaps one (two if we’re lucky) that will enter the category of True Classics. Similarly, there’ll be just enough good cinema amid the dross to make all this hypermediated culture of ours worth putting up with. For 106 minutes anyway.

Pynchon is unlikely to publish another novel (there’s an average gap of about 8 years between them I think, and frankly he must be getting on a bit now, so I’d be mighty grateful if he could write a wee bit faster), but I’m a book behind with William Gibson and he’s becoming increasingly Pynchonesque with each novel. As is Jim Dodge… I wonder if he’ll publish something this year… hmmm…

Overall I suspect if viewed from outside by some passing nomadic space-alien, 2008 will look a lot like 2007. Only slightly grimmer. Viewed from inside though… well, it might just be a good one. You never know.

First up, a cautionary note; this blog post may end up somewhere a wee bit extreme. I’d like to stress that it’s a thought-experiment and I’m certainly not proposing policy here. Thankfully my readership is small and consists almost entirely of members of the choir, so there’s little chance of misinterpretation and/or accusations of apologism for terrorism.

Secondly, let’s state an assumption. If you don’t share this assumption, then the question raised by this thought-experiment isn’t really aimed at you (though you may wish to pay attention to how others respond — not here but in general — over the next few years).

The assumption: Climate Change is a reality. The emission of large quantities of ‘greenhouse gasses’ (primarily, though not exclusively CO2) by human civilisation is resulting in a warming of the atmosphere. This warming is having a whole bunch of both predictable (melting polar ice) and unpredictable (shifting weather patterns) effects. But given just the predictable effects of atmospheric warming, we have good reason to expect significant death and destruction as a direct result.

[Note: for brevity, when capitalised, “Climate Change” specifically refers to ‘anthropogenic climate change’]

Anyway that’s the assumption. If you don’t share it, then could I ask you to perhaps hold off with your objections for a while? I’m writing a piece specifically on the subject of Climate Change Denial and I don’t want to get into it here. For this piece, we’re running with the assumption.

We’re Looking Out For The Whales

Merrick recently drew my attention to news that a Norwegian whaling vessel had been sunk by anti-whaling activists. I firmly believe that most of my readers will whisper a quiet “nice one!” when reading that story. The activists scuttled the ship while nobody was aboard, and did it in such a way that it took four hours to sink, so even if someone had been, the chances of them being in any real danger was negligible. It’s a perfect piece of non-violent direct action and I believe most people who oppose whaling would consider it quite legitimate. If I’m wrong about that then I guess it makes my views more extreme than I imagined, and it also makes the rest of this blog post entirely irrelevant. Sorry about that.

It goes without saying that I’m using a specific definition of “non-violent” action here. Clearly there’s a definition of the word “violent” that includes property damage. But I’m appealing to that a long-established principle within political activism that presumes ‘the tools of tyranny’ to be fair game. And yes, there are those who argue that “the police force” or “the army” or “management” are actually ‘tools of tyranny’, but as I understand it and use it here, non-violent political action includes a clear prohibition on interpersonal violence; “no action aimed at (or that has a significant likelihood of) causing physical harm to people”.

So yeah, assuming I’m not wrong, and most people see the anti-whaling action as legitimate, it raises an awkward question for me. Give it some thought, always bearing in mind the following three items:

1. the unprecedented death and destruction that will result should we be insufficiently aggressive in tackling the threat of Climate Change;
2. the outcome of the Ploughshares Legal Case, where peace activists wrecked a military aircraft built by BAe for the Indonesian airforce, but were acquitted in a British court when they successfully argued they were “preventing a greater crime”;
3. the anti-whaling action mentioned above, where property destruction was achieved without endangering people, and which I contest most readers will feel is legitimate (on whatever “gut level” personal morality works).

The question is actually pretty obvious isn’t it? Context is everything, and by placing next to one another those three mildly controversial points, I pose a highly controversial dilemma. Specifically: are civil airliners, when grounded for maintenance (read, and take seriously, my previous point regarding non-violent direct action), entirely legitimate targets for acts of sabotage? And I’m talking here about legally legitimate as well as ethically. Combine items 1 and 2, above.

The Irish government, for instance, claims to accept the findings of the IPCC. However, the policies being implemented by our new greener government don’t even begin to reflect this. The same can be said of almost every government.

So if I can demonstrate (by the government’s own words) that Climate Change is a massive threat. If I can prove beyond question that current policies do not address the threat. Then if I show up at an aircraft maintenance facility and damage a 737 beyond repair, have I not done something both ethically and legally acceptable? Better yet, what if I and 5000 of my friends show up and wreck the entire facility? How can the destruction of commercial aircraft not be seen as direct action against Climate Change… as an attempt to prevent a greater crime?

Now, my suspicion is that while almost all of you were with me on the whaling ship thing, that I may have lost a few with the mass assault on the assets of the airline industry. It seems strangely less reasonable when it’s something familiar to us, something part of our lives, even though it may objectively be doing more damage. So it’s with some trepidation that I propose my real question…

Why stop with the planes… what about parked cars?

Bunch of arse quite frankly.

The essay has been submitted, but I’m not at all satisfied with it. There’s something very interesting to be said about the Schreber case, dear reader, and you’ll not find it in my essay.

In my defence, the reason the essay is so devoid of anything resembling genuine insight or worth is as much down to the restriction on word-count as any deficiency on the part of the writer. Though of course, I would say that.

All the same, just because I failed to do justice to Schreber this time round doesn’t mean I never will. I may well write my thesis on the case, if — and these are big ifs — (a) I can find an approach that appeals to me*; and (b) something else doesn’t capture my imagination before I start work on it.

So what went wrong this time round?

Well firstly, I came to the subject late. Having already mooched around the Existential Critique essay, and for weeks had a fair idea of what I was going to say, I made the decision to write on Schreber based on a single read-through of Freud’s analysis and with only two weeks before the deadline.

That was a big mistake, as I failed to realise that the subject was far bigger than two weeks research would allow. Even if I narrowed the scope radically. Even if I didn’t sleep very much. Which I did. And didn’t.

It’s never a good idea to decide to write to a deadline on a subject whose surface you’ve only scratched. When I started work I simply had no idea that the paper inspired damn-near an entire subgenre of literature. Nor that it would be so bloody interesting.

The second problem, linked to the first, is the simple fact that nothing interesting can be said about Schreber in less than 10,000 words. I’m a verbose writer at the best of times. I know that, and I try to curtail the worst excesses of this tendency. But all the same, it’s just not possible to provide a useful summation just of the basic facts of the case (including the contents of Schreber’s delusions) in less than 5000 words. And then there’s the analysis and observations which, let’s face it, you’d hope would be the bulk of the content.

So there I was three nights ago, 5000 words into a 3000 word essay, and I’d not even got to discussing Freud’s interpretation let alone my own. Twenty pages of scrawled longhand observations as yet untyped.

So I started afresh. I hacked the 5000 word exposition down to 2000, stripping out anything remotely poetic or beautiful, leaving only stunted prose and a sense of missed opportunity. I jettisoned the bulk of the really interesting stuff, concerning the actual content of Schreber’s delusions. Then I pared down the essence of Freud’s analysis to two specific insights; (a) that paranoid psychosis is a result of repressed homosexuality, and (b) that the agents of persecution in the delusions of paranoiacs are projections of childhood relationships.

Let me point out that those are hardly the only two assertions made by Freud, but they are the central ones. And it’s safe to say that they’re not without controversy.

Unfortunately given the limitations of space I was unable to investigate those controversies, nor delve into the numerous other readings of Schreber’s Memoirs, nor examine the implications that Schreber’s construction of a personal mythology has for our understanding of how the rest of us do the same. I didn’t even have space to examine the actual mechanisms by which Freud states the repression and projection take place.

I set the scene, but the plug was pulled before I could shout “action!”

As I say, bunch of arse.

Here’s a bunch of links to check out while I’m finishing the Schreber essay.

Gyrus emailed me a link to this video at The Onion… Is The Government Spying On Paranoid Schizophrenics Enough? (Warning: Funny bit preceded by annoying commercial).

And while you’re in a video-watching mood, head on over to youtube and check out some of this stuff…

• Pitch ‘n’ Putt with Beckett ‘n’ Joyce. I’ve linked to this before, but it bears repeat viewing. It vies for place with the very different, but equally wonderful Brokeback To The Future, as the best thing I’ve seen on youtube.
• “What keeps mankind alive?” asks William Burroughs on September Songs. His answer, hidden amongst the weirdness, successfully sums up ‘the later Freud’ in a single triplet… “Mankind can keep alive thanks to his aptitude for keeping his humanity repressed / And now for once you must try to face the facts / mankind is kept alive by bestial acts”. You can always trust Uncle Bill to get right down to the nitty of the gritty.
• From the sublime to the ridiculous, and as an antidote to Burroughs’ rather bleak message; Is Chewbacca trapped in my nightstand? It’s 45 seconds long. You only need the first 15. And if that didn’t make you at least smile, then let me do my bit to brighten up your day by pointing you towards Four Hands Guitar. I predict you’ll be grinning within 30 seconds.

Don’t watch. Read. On a screen.

Too much video? Well, there’s some plain old text-on-screen to be had if that’s the bag you’re into. First up, David Byrne explains the sub-prime mortgage crisis. (Is it just me, or is that a weird sentence?)

Next, let me point you at Heathrow: Whose Priorities? and more generally at the smokewriting blog which is a good’un and worthy of a bookmark or an rss grab. It’s not the focus of the blog, but I think Rochenko writes very well on the subject of sustainability. And there’s very few who do.

Climate Change. Oil and gas depletion. One merits capitalisation, the other not just yet

Oh yeah, and on the subject of sustainability and what have you… can I just state for the record that we have almost certainly passed the peak of global oil production. Just thought I’d get that out there. Sleep tight.

I’ve got a really chunky article on climate change and peak oil gestating at the moment, but the last couple of weeks have been all about Schreber, so it’s on the back-burner and will be for a while longer. For those of you who can’t possibly wait “for a while longer” and demand some kind of preview / forewarning, then allow me to condense my recent thinking on these issues down to a single paragraph. Hell, you don’t even need to read the article now that you have this handy “cut-out-and-keep” paragraph to carry around with you and refer to (in particular, at moments of crucial decision-making)*.

And now, here’s Tom with the weather…

Paint it white

Actually, just to wrap up the Climate Change theme, I assume you’ve all read Björn Lomborg’s latest piece in The Guardian, Paint it white? He proposes to combat climate change by painting everything white in order to reflect more heat away from the planet. And he backs up his argument (or appears to) through clever selective use of statistics and scientific jargon. It’s a piece of outright genius, and while I don’t have much time for his views, I salute the man for his rhetorical skill. The discussion that follows almost universally takes the piece at face value; there are one or two who see the joke among the 130-odd comments; a testament to his skill as a writer. The piece is actually a parody of the kind of science and environmental writing that appears in newspaper columns, and although the parody is being produced by someone on the other side of the ideological fence to me, it doesn’t stop me appreciating the quite important point it’s making about how almost anything can be dressed up as science in 600 words.

I mean, he’s talking about “white-washing” the cities! And people are taking him at face value.

I’d prefer a Bag of Holding, but this’ll do I suppose

Not sure if I’ve mentioned this before, but the world’s first true invisibility cloak — a device able to hide an object in the visible spectrum — has been created by physicists in the US. If ever there was an opening line that made you want to read an article, eh? Sadly the actual technology is a long, long way from where your imagination just leapt to, dear reader. Still, one to watch. Or listen out for.

Apologies for the lack of posting, but there’s coursework afoot. The M.Phil is conferred (or not) entirely on the basis of the final thesis, but we’re also required to write a couple of short essays (2-3,000 words) and one of them is due this week.

Originally I decided simply to tackle the default topic, “The Existential Critique of Freud” and wrote a couple of thousand words of deeply uninspiring dross on the subject. I had two major problems with the topic; firstly, I’ve not read nearly enough Freud yet to be capable of making my own critique of his work, so how can I really judge someone else’s with confidence? Secondly, it felt too much like commentating on an activity rather than engaging in it… explaining the views of others rather than expressing my own.

So, irritated by the thought of submitting a lifeless piece of writing, I began casting around for an alternative essay topic. The idea of tackling one of Freud’s short but controversial papers appealed to me, and as luck would have it we started reading just such a paper in our Metapsychology Seminars; Psycho-analytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) (more commonly known as ‘The Schreber Case History’). It’s a remarkable paper that — within the course of 80 pages — succeeds in showing Freud at his brilliant best and his infuriating worst.

But it was a can of worms. My essay title, “Sigmund Freud and the Case History of Schreber” (I’m considering giving Conan-Doyle-esque titles to all my academic work) could easily stretch to a book. Probably not a real page-turner, I grant you, but a book nonetheless. Trying to limit the scope of my research became next to impossible simply because of how interesting and, frankly, bizarre the case is. For instance, we learn from Freud’s paper that the subject of his analysis (Dr. Daniel Paul Schreber) had an extremely authoritarian father. But a bit of research unearths the fact that Schreber’s father so opposed masturbation that he “sought to invent a mechanical device which would prevent it in adolescents”.

None of us get to have a perfect childhood. But imagine growing up in that house!

Anyway Schreber’s sister suffered from hysteria, his elder brother committed suicide, but he himself appeared to have escaped whatever weirdness went on in his childhood. He was a successful lawyer, happily married, apparently well-liked by those who met him, and by his early forties succeeded in being appointed to the bench and was serving as a judge. He had active interests in the world around him, read extensively, attended cultural events. Dr. D.P. Schreber was outwardly (and by his own account, so far as he was aware, inwardly) the epitome of a well-rounded, civilised man.

In his early 40s however he had a nervous breakdown* and was diagnosed with Severe Hypochondria. Sounds to me like he was suffering from stress and nervous exhaustion and there’s nothing particularly unusual about that. He recovered after a few months and returned to work, picking up where he left off, and eventually getting appointed Senate President of Dresden (the highest legal position in his district). His marriage remained happy and he and his wife appear to have been devoted to one another. So far, so good. Then comes the interesting bit.

Upon receiving his promotion to Senate President, Dr. Schreber went completely bonkers**.

He spent the next nine years in institutions where he turned his mind to the problem of his own insanity. This is what takes the case beyond the mundane; Dr. Schreber was a highly intelligent, well-read and erudite man whose sharp mind had in no way been dulled by his madness. He wrote a detailed and explicit account of his delusions, hallucinations and the intricate “personal mythology” he wove in order to explain them as a coherent system rather than the chaotic insanity they appeared to be. He then edited this together with a selection of the medical and diagnostic notes that had been made by his doctors and published his Memoirs of a Nerve Patient.

And it’s mad. Utterly, breath-takingly mad.

So yeah, I’ve been trying to whittle this thesis-sized project down to something resembling an essay. And I’m wondering whether I shouldn’t have chosen a slightly less controversial and considerably less weird paper of Freud’s to produce my first piece of coursework on. But I’ll let you be the judge of that when I’m finally finished (I’ll put up a link to it when it’s done). And with that, I shall sign off and return to my essay.

There’s a big old cardboard box that’s lived in the darkness of a dozen wardrobes. (How’s that for an intro rich in potent psychoanalytic symbolism?) It originally housed a Commodore-64 personal computer, which means I’ve been moving this box from house to house, wardrobe to wardrobe, since Athens in 1985. It’s a long long time since it contained a C-64 though. Over the years it has become the repository for my old dream-diaries, letters I’ve received (and a few I never sent), personal journals filled with strange scribblings, cards, photos and assorted frozen memories. So, despite outward appearances, this is not an innocuous cardboard box. Far from it. This is something to be approached with extreme caution.

This time round I only lost half a Saturday. It helps if you open the cache with a specific target… in this case something that had survived the great journal purge of the mid-90s by virtue of being written in an old school jotter… a painfully earnest essay written after reading The Communist Manifesto for the first time. I was sixteen and just becoming aware of politics. Someone (MM) had thrust a copy of Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book into my hand around then, and I’d also somehow picked up the entirely erroneous view that being a Marxist was inherently edgy and sexy. Apparently it entailed sitting in Parisian cafés with women who looked like Audrey Hepburn.

I had it confused with existentialism.

So I’d been calling myself a communist and a marxist (and sometimes a Maoist) for a few months when it occurred to me that it’d be a good idea to read something on the subject. Besides, the expected deluge of Audrey Hepburns had never materialised, so I had plenty of free time. I read The Communist Manifesto having found the Little Red Book completely mystifying. And overnight I became a libertarian capitalist and remained that way for several years. Without a doubt The Communist Manifesto is the worst advertisement for social justice ever written.

The essay I wrote in response is called “The Big Problem with The Communist Manifesto”. As a stylistic conceit, each paragraph opens with “The Big Problem with The Communist Manifesto is…” It gets tired and tiresome very quickly indeed and makes me cringe a little, though in my defence I was sixteen! I’ve seen the same approach used by professional journalists; what’s their excuse?

That was the line I was looking for. It’s the first thing I ever wrote on the subject of sustainability. Admittedly, it was another twelve years before I returned to the subject. Still, it’s as valid a sentiment now as it was then.

Impossible to ignore however, on the jotter page immediately prior to The Big Problem with The Communist Manifesto I had written a single phrase. The three words fill the page and are written in carefully constructed letters with intricate cross-hatching. They state, bluntly, “Bowie is God”.

And yes, that too is still as valid a sentiment now as it was then. So in honour of the purity of my 16-year old self’s insight, here’s an artist-specific version of that old “First Line” quiz. Identify the following Bowie songs from their first line…

1. I’ve come on a few years from my Hollywood highs
2. (Hello love) (Goodbye love) / Didn’t know what time it was, the lights were low… oh… oh
3. I’m stomping along on this big Philip Johnson
4. Tragic youth was looking young and sexy
5. When all the world was very young, and mountain magic heavy hung
6. As they pulled you out of the oxygen tent, you asked for the latest party
7. Oh. Ooooooooooh yeah. Ahhhhhhh!
8. Let me put my arms around your head…
9. Aaaaahoh. Aaaaaaaaahohhhh. Do do do do do. Do do do do dooooooooo…
10. Nothing remains. We could run when the rain slows.
11. Stinky weather / fat shaky hand / Dopey morning doc / Grumpy gnomes
12. And so the story goes they wore the clothes, they said the things to make it seem improbable
13. Day after day, they send my friends away
14. Cold fire, you’ve got everything but cold fire
15. Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooo oh! Weaving down a by-road, singing the song

Is it possible that a crucial piece of information has been omitted from this BBC news report? Because taken at face value, the report appears to be stating that a man has been handed a 3 year suspended prison sentence and placed on the sex-offenders register for… well, for masturbating in his own room. I can only assume that he did something else as well. Because if the facts are as reported, then Sheriff Colin Miller (who passed judgement in the case) needs to retire immediately as he’s clearly not in possession of the required sense of proportion demanded by his job. I also suggest that a team of detectives is hired to dig into Sheriff Miller’s past and unearth evidence that the good Sheriff has “had a swift one off the wrist” in his own home at some point in his life (because, and here I speak with utter certainty, he has done) and then get him slapped onto the sex-offenders register along with the poor sod he’s decided to persecute.

Hell, why not put everyone who ever got themselves off in the privacy of their own home on the damn register? To save some time, just grab the electoral register and rename the thing. Let’s ensure it’s entirely useless, why don’t we?

There’s a comical slant to this story of course, and because the comical aspect is what caught the Beeb’s eye, that’s what has been emphasised. But beneath the odd imagery and the prurient sniggering there’s a very serious story here that’s being completely ignored… a man has been placed on the sex-offenders register for masturbating in private. How is that even possible!?

The bicycle is clearly the problem

According to the BBC report, the victim of this outrageous perversion of justice, a Mr. RS, returned to his own room in the homeless hostel in which he was living. So while I know nothing about RS, from the outset it sounds to me like he’s already having a bit of a crappy time of it just now. He was a bit drunk, but not completely out of it. He certainly had wits enough about him to lock the door to his room. So this was no deliberate, or even oblivious, act of exhibitionism. RS was in his own space behind a locked door. He was only discovered when a member of the hostel staff entered the room using a master key.

The next bit is what propelled the tale into the media; rather than indulging in a… to put it bluntly, “a traditional wank”, RS had found some feature on his bicycle which, when rubbed against, apparently did the job for him. Now, the problem with that is the human imagination is liable to run riot with that image. This can’t be helped, it’s intrinsically bizarre. To me though, it’s very much on the comical side of bizarre. Sheriff Miller somehow places it on the threatening and morally dangerous side.

But ultimately, the fact that it’s a bicycle is utterly irrelevant. It’s an inanimate object, and given that sex-toys are legal in Scotland and assuming there’s no legal regulations regarding their shape (I don’t know this for a fact, but it’s hardly a major assumption), then pleasuring oneself with an inanimate object is not against the law. Had RS been using a blow-up sex doll, would he have been placed on the sex-offenders register? If RS had been female and had been using a vibrator, would she find herself with a three-year suspended sentence? Indeed, does Sheriff Miller’s judgement set a precedent effectively outlawing dildos in Scotland?

And that’s not a rhetorical question. This is a man who has been placed on the sex-offenders register. It’s as far from a laughing matter as it’s possible to get, despite the whole bicycle-as-sex-toy incongruous imagery. Seriously, try and imagine having to go through life with that on your CV. It’s got to be tough to know the right time in a new relationship to announce that particular bit of news… “Oh by the way, I won’t be able to take part in any Parent-Teacher Association stuff…”

Most of us assume that the sex-offenders register is used to keep track of rapists and child-molesters. And in my view there is merit in doing that. I believe that some forms of criminal behaviour reveal pathologies that are unlikely to have been addressed by a prison sentence. So if a person is found guilty of sexually assaulting a child, then that fact should be taken into account if that person applies for a job at a school later in life, even if they’ve technically “paid their debt to society” with a prison sentence.

However the sex-offenders register becomes worse than useless if people like RS (“guilty” of using a sex toy in his own locked room) are side-by-side on the list with the child abusers and serial rapists. It ceases to be a reliable list used to identify potentially dangerous individuals, and becomes nothing more than a stick used by the judiciary to beat whomsoever they please. A new way for Sheriff Miller to heap yet more misery into our already heavily-laden world.

UPDATE (16:23): Great minds… and all that.

My favourite headline of the past few days, though I was rather disappointed that the actual content of the story wasn’t what I’d hoped for, is: Prince quits as head of Citigroup (Update: like so many news sites these days, the FT appears to revise published stories rather than publish a separate update, making illustrative links rather hit & miss. In this case, the headline has changed, but remains funny).

The former head of Citigroup chooses his successor

Sadly it appears that it’s not a story about The Artist Once Again Known as Prince stepping down from his position as chairman of one of the world’s largest financial conglomerates in order to spend more time touring.

€38,000 – a token amount of money

Meanwhile here in Ireland, recently re-elected Taoiseach Bertie Ahern has accepted a €38,000 pay rise. This represents an increase to his salary greater than the average working wage and brings his total income to €310,000 per annum. He defended this by pointing out that the body that sets his salary “is an independent organisation and its recommendations will be implemented by the Government”. One wonders just how independent the review board would remain had they recommended a significant pay cut for Bertie and his cronies, and whether or not the government would be so keen to implement that recommendation.

To add insult to injury, however, Bertie dismissed the furore that inevitably followed the announcement of his 14% pay hike. Apparently it would be “pure tokenism” for him to refuse the increase. Maybe it’s just me, but when the leader of the nation can describe the average national wage as “a token amount of money” then he’s clearly lost touch with reality. It’s also worth bearing in mind the fact that Bertie’s team recently dug their heels in, and watched the nurses vote for industrial action over their “unrealistic” demands for a 10% pay rise.

Still, in his defence, there are those who would argue that the Taoiseach’s pay-hike should be even bigger. After all, 38 thousand is the sort of paltry sum that Bertie simply wouldn’t remember ever having received.

It’s no sacrifice

Meanwhile we hear that despite massive increases in fuel prices, Ryanair’s profits are soaring on a 20% increase in passenger numbers. At the same time Thomson Travel Agents have started up a new low-cost flight service between the UK and Israel. All the while, pretty much every relevant agency and government that expresses an opinion tells us that the battle against climate change is “too little and too slow“. And whenever the public are polled they insist that stringent measures need to be taken and sacrifices need to be made.

My own view (which I’ve expressed on numerous occasions here) is that catastrophic climate change is an inevitability and that in tandem with resource depletion we will see the collapse of industrialised civilisation (and a consequent large loss of life) within the next couple of decades. The process has, I believe, already begun.

So while I don’t believe that being an active consumer of low-cost flights will make a practical difference at this point, I do believe that it’s an offensively tasteless activity to be involved in. Just like the ex-soldier who urinated on a dying woman in the street, his actions had no discernible effect on whether the woman lived or died, but he’s still a nasty scumbag and should be vilified as such (link via PDF).