The Quiet Road

Contrary to what those involved would have us believe, investment banking is not actually that difficult a job. Certainly when compared with being a successful surgeon, nuclear physicist or civil engineer; the skill set required by banking is neither extensive nor terribly difficult to acquire.

Which isn’t to say “anyone could do it”. Along with the necessary skills, there are certain personality traits without which, a person would find investment banking extremely arduous. There’s a lot of politics involved, probably more than most jobs, and a person needs to be adept at navigating an upwards trajectory in a cut-throat environment. Also required is a willingness to work more hours than many people are comfortable with. Those tend to be difficult characteristics to acquire. Crucially however, those who already have them are far from being a rare breed.

So the reason successful bankers are paid enormous wages and even more enormous bonuses is entirely down to the nature of the industry they work in, rather than any inherent “star quality” they may possess as individuals. It isn’t due to the hard work of modern investment bankers… humble beginnings investing their pocket money in local community projects when they were twelve, and a few decades later finding their activities have grown into a multi-billion dollar bank. It’s because they got a job in the money industry and were successful at it.

Investment banking deals with huge sums of money. In fact, pretty much the entire purpose of the industry is to move large sums of money around. So when the bank takes a percentage profit on a given transaction, it’s a percentage of a large sum. And this needs to be stressed. They don’t earn huge amounts of money because what they do is extremely difficult (or even all that useful… but that’s a discussion for another day), but because there happen to be more zeroes on their Excel spreadsheets than on the spreadsheets of a bakery or a pub.

Which is why I find the outrage and arrogance of London’s investment bankers, when confronted with a windfall tax on their bonuses, to be so hilarious. They talk about how such a move will force “the stars” of the banking world to leave London for places without such “punitive tax rates”. The implication being that this will deal a serious blow to London’s — and by extension, Britain’s — economy.

I’m forced to wonder if this is just posturing on their part, or do they honestly believe such twaddle? It appears that earning huge salaries for several years has the ability to convince highly ambitious, semi-skilled sharks that they are indispensible. When the truth is that there’s a mass of similar people more than willing to do the same job for 50% of the cash (bearing in mind that 50% of Bob Diamond’s cumulative £20million bonus is more than enough to motivate most people).

I’m also wondering, given that this latest windfall tax will target the bonus payments of “tens of thousands of bankers”, exactly where they all intend to go? Are there really places in the world looking to hire tens of thousands of foreign bankers and pay them huge lightly-taxed bonuses? Is there truly a major lack of experienced investment bankers in New York, Frankfurt or Tokyo?

And even if a handful of banking “stars” do find work elsewhere, the idea that they are taking a unique skill set with them, and that nobody in London is capable of stepping into their shoes, is deluded beyond belief.

Equatorial Guinea is a pretty awful place to live. Unless, of course, you happen to be a member of the ruling elite. Despite experiencing recent economic growth thanks to the discovery of oil, the population largely live in poverty with almost all of the petroleum revenue being appropriated by President Obiang to fund a luxurious lifestyle for him and his inner circle, as well as ensuring the military are paid well enough to keep him in power. Although there are occasional elections, they are quite obviously loaded in Obiang’s favour and nobody is under any illusions about him being willing to relinquish power voluntarily. He is a dictator in all but name, and while he probably isn’t responsible for quite as much bloodshed and tyranny as the guy he overthrew, that’s really not saying much given the record of Francisco Macías Nguema. Macías reputably had a penchant for mass public executions to the soundtrack of Mary Hopkin’s Those Were The Days. His regime was nightmarish in the most literal of senses… terrifying and surreal all at once, like a David Lynch film writ large.

If you’re an ordinary person in Equatorial Guinea, you have a difficult life and probably quite a short one.

It’s worth pointing out that when people describe Equatorial Guinea as “oil rich”, it’s a statement that needs to be placed in some context. In fact, with estimated recoverable reserves of a little under 2 billion barrels, Equatorial Guinea represents a fraction of one percent of global oil. However, with a population of less than 650,000 that should, in the right hands, be enough wealth to provide the country with a more than adequate health, education and social welfare system. Given their oil resources in proportion to their population size Equatorial Guinea could be a very pleasant place to live given radically different circumstances.

It’s the sort of place that could desperately do with a change in government.

And about five years ago, a group of men decided to try do just that. A bunch of South African mercenaries led by Simon Mann (a former British SAS officer turned soldier-for-hire) were preparing to launch a coup d’état when they were seized enroute to Equatorial Guinea. The Zimbabwean government intercepted their chartered plane when it touched down in Harare to take on supplies and Mann was extradited to the small West African nation to stand trial. During the trial allegations were made that Mann’s coup attempt was being backed by members of the British establishment including Sir Mark Thatcher (son of a certain ex-Prime Minister) and Jeffrey Archer (baron, bad novelist, prominent tory and all round git). These remain “allegations”, though Thatcher’s involvement in providing logistical support has been proven despite his insistence that he was unaware of the details of the plan and had no idea Mann and his private army were up to anything dodgy.

The details of the operation are obviously a little vague, but the basic plan seems to have been to overthrow Obiang and install either Mann himself or a local puppet as President of the country whereupon those who organised, financed and took part in the coup would reap the rewards in much the same way that Obiang currently does. I feel confident that largescale infrastructure projects and a redistribution of the oil wealth to the general populace wasn’t on the cards.

Mann was placed on trial in Equatorial Guinea and found guilty of plotting to overthrow the government. In July last year he was sentenced to 34 years in prison.

Now, it’s fair to say that Equatorial Guinea probably doesn’t have the most robust or transparent judiciary. People like President Obiang rarely install that kind of thing in the countries they rule. Dictators can be funny like that. Nonetheless, there’s no question — given Mann’s own public statements — that the basic facts are as stated. Surprisingly (or not if you assume that some kind of deal was done… cf. not the most robust or transparent judiciary) Mann has just been released having served less than a year and a half of his 34 year sentence. He appears to be a guy with an axe to grind and is looking to get even with the other coup plotters who left him swinging in the wind.

Despite the obvious relish with which some are anticipating whatever he’s got up his sleeve for Thatcher, there are others; Merrick for instance; who point out quite rightly that “a vicious mercenary is now free to enjoy his millionaire’s lifestyle and work on his book deal and film options”. This is hardly very satisfactory and is a somewhat lamentable outcome to the entire affair.

John Band, on the other hand, via that horrid twitter service that irritates me considerably, makes the following comments…

and then (because twitter insists on breaking simplistic soundbites down into absurd soundnibbles)

Taken at face value (and Twitter is doubtlessly doing John a disservice by reducing his position to two sentences of less than 140 characters each) that’s a pretty dreadful sentiment. It seems to be saying that so long as the regime is bad enough, it doesn’t matter if rich westerners storm into an African country, kill a bunch of people, overthrow the government and then syphon off the mineral wealth for their own benefit. It’s an endorsement of violent imperialism because the suggestion that Mann and his 70 heavily armed mercenaries were going to liberate the people of Equatorial Guinea from tyranny is risible.

Perhaps they’d have set up a regime that was moderately less oppressive? But that resolves into an endorsement of Obiang’s government given the fact that it is moderately less oppressive than the Macías dictatorship it replaced.

The reason we should be upset about the likes of Simon Mann and his establishment backers… the reason their actions should matter… is because military intervention and murder for personal gain should not be tolerated even if most of the dead were bastards. People like Mann are no different to the Obiangs of the world, even if he did go to Eton. And I’m a little taken aback that John seems to think it doesn’t matter if they go tearing around Africa pocketing the continent’s wealth at gunpoint.

Over at U-Know! someone posted a link to an article in The Guardian from last November (Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes). The article discusses a technology under development by Hyperion Power Generation in Los Alamos, New Mexico. It’s essentially a small nuclear reactor capable of powering tens of thousands of homes and costing a relatively modest $25m.

A quick search on google news reveals an article on Reuters as recently as this week (Hyperion Has a $100M Valuation for Mini Nuclear Power) which includes the paragraph:

Now those two articles and a reading of Hyperion’s website (mostly marketing bumpf investor relations) are the extent of my knowledge on this subject, so I don’t know enough about the specifics of their solution to offer a considered critique of the actual technology. However there are some generic criticisms of this approach to energy production that I feel are valid and worth highlighting. All the same, I’m flagging this post in advance as a “first thoughts / first impressions” thing. OK?

And on that basis… yikes!

Small enough to be transported on a ship, truck or train, Hyperion power modules are about the size of a “hot tub” — approximately 1.5 meters wide. Out of sight and safe from nefarious threats, Hyperion power modules are buried far underground and guarded by a security detail. Like a power battery, Hyperion modules have no moving parts to wear down, and are delivered factory sealed. They are never opened on site. Even if one were compromised, the material inside would not be appropriate for proliferation purposes. Further, due to the unique, yet proven science upon which this new technology is based, it is impossible for the module to go supercritical, “melt down” or create any type of emergency situation. If opened, the very small amount of fuel that is enclosed would immediately cool. The waste produced after five years of operation is approximately the size of a softball and is a good candidate for fuel recycling.

Perfect for moderately-sized projects, Hyperion produces only 25 MWe — enough to provide electricity for about 20,000 average American sized homes or its industrial equivalent. Ganged or teamed together, the modules can produce even more consistent energy for larger projects.

The Hyperion team is committed to helping make the clean and safe benefits of nuclear power — benefits that could assist in solving the worst of our planet’s problems — available in even the most remote locations. We hope you will enjoy learning about Hyperion through our web site!

Why Hyperion?

“Nefarious threats”? They make it sound like they’re securing the place against attack from Dr. Evil. Or that we live in a world where the worst thing that could happen is Terry-Thomas might show up and attempt to do something dastardly. Poor copywriting aside, I believe that passage from their website, coupled with some of the claims being made in the media, should raise some serious concerns.

Thousands of little nuclear reactors encased in concrete, scattered all over the world, maintained and secured by the lowest-cost local contractors? There’s a whole bunch of things wrong with that.

First of all, this commits us to a heavily industrialised future which I’m not sure is a sensible decision (i.e. one in which uranium mining and processing is done on a scale that rivals the modern oil industry — how this squares with the claim in the Reuters piece that “nuclear power […] doesn’t release greenhouse gases” is anybody’s guess). I’m not suggesting we abandon technology or automation or electrical energy; merely that we need to scale our usage of these things back dramatically if we wish to use them sustainably. Be far smarter and more selective in the technologies we adopt or continue to use.

Secondly, the waste management issues just give me the head-staggers. It’s one thing having a few secure, essentially semi-militarised, locations where the waste is produced and stored. Even that’s problematic in my view. But to handle a massively distributed network (“available in even the most remote locations”) with a reasonable guarantee that none of the stuff ever ends up in the local reservoirs? Significantly increasing the amount of highly toxic waste we produce when there are alternatives? Future history books will view such decisions as criminally negligent… beyond reprehensible and into pure evil. Always assuming there’s going to be history books chronicling our times and crimes.

Thirdly, I’m always worried when the person selling the technology creates a huge straw man regarding security. What’s he trying to distract us from?

I’m not too worried about someone weaponising this stuff. North Korea’s already done that, and depending upon how the next few years go in Pakistan, some seriously hardline Islamists may get their hands on that technology too. Also, I’m not so sure that we can rely upon Israel to pursue a rational, evidence-based foreign policy and even the countries we view as being a relatively safe pair of hands are more than capable of rationalising a pre-emptive strike one of these days. So the “scary people with nukes” cat is very much out of the bag.

What worries me isn’t a nation state getting hold of this stuff and weaponising it, but a less organised bunch of psychos getting hold of it and poisoning wells and water-tables for several generations. See, I’m not sure exactly what part of “stealing a barbecue with your bare hands” would have prevented the September 11th hijackers doing so if it was part of their mission. For me the security risk of these things is a dedicated group of nutters — some of whom, perhaps, work for a local concrete supply company? — who don’t care about getting their hands burnt, metaphorically speaking. Unfortunately it seems there are plenty of people who’d be willing to expose themselves to a lethal dose of radiation as they steal a bunch of uranium “softballs” from one of the more remote clusters of these things.

Even if powdering the stuff and dumping it into a handful of municipal reservoirs was demonstrated to only raise the risk of childhood leukemia by 0.5% in those areas, how soon before you’ve got a bunch of ghost-towns? Ghost-cities? Millions of families won’t make a level-headed and rational assessment of the risks when the headlines scream “Radioactive Reservoir! Al Qaeda dumps uranium in Dallas water supply!”

The whole thing is fraught with the kind of “What Ifs” that just don’t enter the equation when you recommend a combination of renewable energy and a reduction in consumption.

But I’d be interested in having those “What Ifs” answered and I’ll look out for more information on this over the coming months should it start to gain credibility. Maybe this is the magic space dust we’ve been waiting for.

Eon is a German-based (edited from “UK-based”… thanks to John B in the comments) energy company that powers a large slice of the British electricity grid. They employ a variety of technologies to achieve this but appear to have settled upon coal as the fuel of the future (ironic, really, as the continued widespread use of coal is a great way to help destroy the future). A massive investment is about to be made in building the first new coal-fired power station in Britain for decades, at Kingsnorth in Kent. This must be strenuously opposed.

Eon naturally spend quite a bit of money on public relations and have employed people to convince us (though mostly to convince the politicians) that so long as you preface the word “coal” with the word “clean” it is rendered benign. It makes me wonder whether bioterrorists could escape prosecution by insisting in court that they’d filled the envelopes with “Clean Anthrax”.

– Do you deny sending packages filled with anthrax to politicians?
– No your honour, we do not deny this, however we’d like to point out that we used Clean Anthrax.
– But did the politicians not die?
– They did, your honour, but you must understand that our anthrax was “Antidote Ready”.
– Antidote Ready? Please explain this…
– Well, we sent the anthrax secure in the knowledge that at some unspecified future date we would be able to develop an antidote…

Not that I wish to claim that Eon are bioterrorists. Even I admit that describing CO2 emissions as a biological agent would be stretching things a little.

“Eco-terrorists” would be a better phrase I think. Though that appears to be already in use, to describe those who seek to oppose the destruction of the environment by maniacs like Eon.

For more about Eon and about why each mention of Eon is linked to NoNewCoal.org.uk, check out this post over on Merrick’s blog.

Update: It might also be worth pointing out that Eon is sometimes written E.On or occasionally E-On. Just so you know.

Over on a web forum I visit occasionally, we’ve been discussing the ‘Facebook’ website / social engineering experiment. And I think I may have gotten a bit ranty to be honest. Given that this is a more appropriate forum for such rantiness, I figured I’d reproduce my “summary position” here.

Even without following those discussions, it’ll come as no surprise to you that I’m firmly in the anti-Facebook camp. And when I say “firmly”, I mean in the sense that they’re having to build me a special camp in the next field… even further from the pro-Facebook camp than the regular anti-Facebook camp.

A couple of days ago, Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, made a speech about the company’s plans for the future. It contains an interesting statement. And by “interesting”, I mean “fucking terrifying”.

But before I get onto that, let me recap the main pre-existing arguments for never visiting the facebook site ever again.

They fall into three broad categories.

Firstly, the question of what happens to your information once it gets uploaded to Facebook is a very murky one. They certainly never explicitly claim copyright or ownership of your information, but they do claim all manner of usage rights that amount to almost the same thing in practice, even if not by legal definition. Within this same point is the fact that Facebook made it impossible to delete your account up until recently (when bad publicity forced them to change policy). They still make it difficult (you can’t delete your info, you ask them by email to do it for you) and — vitally — given that they are not obliged to notify you when they sell your data to a third party, you have no idea whether or not it’s already been flogged to UltraMegaCorp by the time they get round to deleting it.

And in practice, it almost certainly already has. Because Facebook have an ongoing relationship with numerous corporations to provide them with user data on a regular basis. These include Coca-Cola, Blockbuster, Verizon, Sony Pictures and Condé Nast. Amongst others.

Secondly, the political and philosophical problems posed by any large centralised database are, at the very least, worthy of cautious consideration. A consideration that few have given it. Mostly because it’s “voluntary”, not because people are unable to consider these things. When the government propose it and talk about it being mandatory, then people rightfully question the decision.

Thing is, the same problems that exist with a mandatory database also exist with a voluntary one if everyone volunteers.

These kinds of databases are an absolute nightmare from a social justice and civil-liberties standpoint. They encourage an uncomfortable power/control relationship between those who control the data and those who provide it. While on the one hand, the data will allow the database owner to track and identify broad trends within the data-set, it will also allow them to identify mechanisms to manipulate those trends, and the interactive nature of the Facebook website may even provide the mechanisms by which such controls are put in place.

“Is control controlled by it’s need to control?” as Burroughs perceptively asked. And yes, it is. But control still tends to come out better in its relationships with those it controls.

If you get me.

And this is problematic even if control is benign. Even if the guy at the top is Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington. Even if he’s in charge, the risks of him screwing things up are just too great.

Which brings me onto Number 3. It’s very much linked to the second argument, but deserves a bold intro of its own.

Thirdly, it’s not James Stewart running this thing. It’s the fucking CIA!

And no. That’s not a kooky conspiracy theory. Check it out for yourself. There’s been articles written on the subject in the mainstream media, and Facebook haven’t argued with any of them to the best of my knowledge (which I feel certain they would do if they were nonsense). One of the big finance guys behind Facebook is a board member for In-Q-Tel.

In the words of Tom Hodgkinson’s Guardian article…

I’d rather not link directly to their website, by the way. Yes I am that paranoid. The strapline for In-Q-Tel dot com?

Ohhhhhhkaaaaaay. I mean honestly. If you’re not going to be paranoid about those people, who are you going to be paranoid about? Eh?

Think about that for a second. I’m not saying that Facebook is the CIA, by the way. Merely that they are part-funded by a guy who kind of works for the CIA. So I think you’ll agree, despite their claims to the contrary, the idea that the CIA don’t have open access to this data, and aren’t analysing it for some reason is, oddly enough, the far-fetched one in this particular instance.

Weird, huh?

I have this image of the CIA opening up a website and asking people to volunteer as much personal information as possible. And of people signing up in their droves. 90 million people at last count. And I say to myself, “don’t be silly Jim, that image is too far-fetched. Even Philip K. Dick would have rejected it as too implausible for a short story”.

People, willingly donating a ton of data (that’s imperial, not metric by the way, we’re talking a lot of data) about themselves to the C.I. fricking A. For them to make shitloads of money with by selling it to Coca fricking Cola. Money to fund Eris-knowns-what, but I doubt it’s cat fricking sanctuaries. I mean these people will be classified as a terrorist organisation by future historians! Don’t be willingly surrendering your life history, personal philosophy, favourite books, music, films to them. Don’t tell them who your friends are, and where you like to hang out and what medication you’re on and what mood you’re in. Don’t open yourself up to these people! And don’t be filling in their silly little tests.

– What answer did you choose for question 6? “C” huh? Y’know only 8% of respondents chose “C”? Funny that… …

What do you mean: “funny that… …”?

– “Ohhhh… Nothing.”

Because they ain’t just making money off your data, they’re giving it to the folks downstairs in psy-ops. And they’ve been cooking up some deeply strange stuff to do with it.

And look, when I say “these people”, they’re probably nice enough, y’know? Treat their friends and family well, and give to charity regularly. But they’re on the wrong mission. And that’s what’s important here.

It’s hardly a coincidence, therefore, that Peter Thiel (the power behind the throne at Facebook) should be a self-described neoconservative activist who espouses a philosophy that can be accurately summarised as…

No. No. No! You don’t want to be helping people like him (a) get richer, or (b) do anything at all that he wants to do.

Right? When the nutter down the road starts ranting about destroying the real world and creating a new one that he controls… you feel a bit sad for him and hope he’s feeling better soon. When a billionaire with CIA connections starts expressing those thoughts out loud… you hope you’ll not be the only one at the barricades come the day.

Anyways, that’s my Facebook rant. Sorry it went on so long, but it’s always good to get that kind of thing off your chest.

(and to those who say, ‘But I don’t give my real details’, I would suggest that doesn’t actually invalidate most of the above… even assuming they ain’t logging your IP address. Which, let’s face it, they probably are. If the people behind Facebook asked you to help them out with this social engineering experiment they’re running, would you really want to take part even under condition of anonymity? Really?)

Anyways, the recent development that sparked this little outburst is the news that the CEO of Facebook (the chap on the throne, situated in front of Peter Thiel) gave a recent speech in which he outlined the next steps for the company. It included the line…

Is it just me that doesn’t want those people to have that kind of product?

UPDATE 3:30pm: As pointed out in the comments below, and upon re-reading The Guardian article, it does seem like I may have misinterpreted the financing of Facebook. Although a director of In-Q-Tel is a major advisor to Facebook, there’s no evidence provided that Facebook is actively funded by them. So it may well be that they are not benefitting financially from the company. I stress “may”, because I still feel that many of the connections between the US intelligence community and Facebook will be — almost by definition — clandestine. The CIA, like all national secret services, is not an organisation known for conducting its business in public. Even if they are not direct investors in the corporation, I believe they will still benefit financially, as well as in other ways, from having access to the information provided by Facebook users. Thanks to Michael, in the comments, for highlighting the potential inaccuracy.

A while ago I received an email from a friend asking whether or not I had a number for the amount of CO2 emitted by a barrel of oil. I searched for a while but couldn’t turn up anything definitive. So, given I know a little bit about the subject, I decided to work it out myself. The calculations can be found here: Oil Companies and Climate Change. After a few conversions, it turns out that the amount of CO2 produced by the liquid fuel products of an average barrel of crude oil is 317kg.

That’s simple enough and is pretty uncontroversial, I believe. The calculations themselves are not difficult, and anyone who paid attention in high-school chemistry should be more than capable of them. The only thing that made my calculations in any way noteworthy is the fact that I appear to be the first person to have published them in an easily accessible (via google) place. Nothing more.

I then took that 317kg (which was the primary goal of my work, as it’s a useful reference figure) and applied it to a specific real-world project. In this case, the Peterhead / Miller Field carbon capture scheme proposed by BP. According to the BP press release:

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.

BP | Industrial-scale decarbonized fuels project

And in the following paragraph:

The project would also permanently store 1.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of removing 300,000 cars from the roads.

BP | Industrial-scale decarbonized fuels project

Based upon these figures, provided by BP, it is clear that the 40 million barrels of oil will generate (multiply by 317kg) approximately 12.68 million tonnes of CO2. Which clearly dwarfs the 1.3 million tonnes that BP claims will be stored.

My calculations were cited by George Monbiot in a recent Guardian article, as a demonstration that the claims being made for carbon capture are somewhat dubious.

However, in a response to Monbiot’s piece (via Tim Worstall) comes this:

In 2005 BP proposed to build a new gas-fired power station at Peterhead, capture the carbon dioxide produced and use it for enhanced oil recovery in the Miller field below the North Sea; this innovative project could have been up and running in 2009. Monbiot is wrong to suggest that the plan would have led to more carbon emissions than savings: between 1.8m and 2m tonnes of carbon dioxide would be injected each year over 20 years, producing an additional 40m-60m barrels of oil. Taking the higher numbers, 40m tonnes of carbon dioxide remains underground, while burning the oil produces approximately 20m tonnes; twice as much carbon dioxide is stored than emitted.

The abandonment of the Miller scheme due to lack of government support means a loss of $6bn in oil revenues and a missed opportunity to take a lead in reducing carbon emissions.

Professor Martin Blunt
Department of earth science and engineering,
Imperial College London

The important piece to note here is: “between 1.8m and 2m tonnes of carbon dioxide would be injected each year over 20 years”. While this doesn’t affect my “carbon-per-barrel” number, if true, then clearly it radically alters the figures for the BP project under discussion.

I’ve spent the morning on the phone to various people in BP (you would not believe how difficult it is to track down someone who knows what they’re talking about, let alone someone who has even heard of the project in question) and was eventually informed that contrary to the statement in their press release, the 1.3 million tonnes is indeed a per annum figure (they don’t know where the 1.8 to 2 million figure came from, but they do claim 1.3 million per annum).

This — if true — invalidates my claim that the project would produce far more CO2 than is captured. Worse, far worse, it undercuts Mr. Monbiot’s article and I feel completely sick about that. In my defence, I was carrying out my calculations based upon figures published by BP, and I’m not sure I should have expected them to grossly underestimate the amount of CO2 being captured by their own scheme. But all the same, I’m afraid I must apologise to all concerned, particularly George Monbiot. There’s few things worse than being responsible for errors in someone else’s work. Really makes you feel like crap.

As most people will have heard by now (it’s been pretty widely reported), a recent study by a British University (Hull) suggests that…

… compared with placebo, the new-generation antidepressants do not produce clinically significant improvements in depression in patients who initially have moderate or even very severe depression, but show significant effects only in the most severely depressed patients. The findings also show that the effect for these patients seems to be due to decreased responsiveness to placebo, rather than increased responsiveness to medication. Given these results, the researchers conclude that there is little reason to prescribe new-generation antidepressant medications to any but the most severely depressed patients unless alternative treatments have been ineffective.

Kirsch, Deacon, Huedo-Medina, Scoboria, Moore and Johnson
Initial Severity and Antidepressant Benefits: A Meta-Analysis of Data Submitted to the Food and Drug Administration

I’ve just finished reading the actual study (link above). It’s a statistical analysis of the available data, not a psychiatric / medical study in itself, so it was tough going and rather dull stuff for someone like me with no formal training in statistics. All the same, if this study is confirmed (and it’s important to note that it has only just been opened up to the peer-review process, so we shouldn’t leap to any conclusions until this has been done) then it’s a damning indictment not only of the pharmaceutical companies (who, after all, we kind of expect this kind of behaviour from anyway) but more importantly of the regulatory bodies all over the world who have approved this medication.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should point out that the findings come as something of a surprise to me. Some years ago I was diagnosed with clinical depression (on the severe side, but not within the “most severe” category… I did not require hospitalisation, though it was considered at one stage) and prescribed extremely high doses of one of the SSRIs investigated by the Hull analysis. I’m no longer taking them — I’m very glad to say, as I wasn’t a fan of the side-effects — but I do attribute my recovery in part to the medication. Needless to say, I’m rather intrigued by the possibility that I’d have gotten roughly the same benefit from a placebo.

Indeed, if anything, this seems to be another justification for my current belief that psychoanalytic psychotherapy (incorporating, though not restricted to, some of the techniques of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) is the best treatment for depression. It probably goes without saying, that particular belief is one of the primary reasons I’m studying what I’m studying (mind you, that’s a far longer article).

Because of the enthusiastic approval of anti-depressants by official regulators, doctors see it as a simple and efficient way of treating an increasingly common illness. Unfortunately, if — as it appears — the bloody things don’t actually work, then it means we’re flushing an awful lot of public money down the drain (or rather, we’re meekly handing it over to large corporations) which has an actively damaging effect on public health, as we’re underfunding other therapies which do have a clinically significant effect above and beyond that produced by a placebo.

As I say, we half-expect large corporations to fudge the figures in search of profit, but the regulatory bodies are supposed to be on our side. We employ them to root-out these kinds of false claims, but if this study is confirmed, it would appear that the FDA (and the others who followed suit) are guilty either of dangerous incompetence, or of deliberately putting corporate profits before the mental health of the public.

UPDATE 16:35 I was chatting with a friend today. His girlfriend was on the same antidepressants as I was prescribed (Venlafaxine) and like me, she found them helpful but is glad to be off them. He said, mischievously but rather perceptively, “aren’t you lucky you were taking them while they still worked?”

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.

Today the Financial Times reports that BP has begun to significantly invest in biofuel technology, and this week alone has signed two deals to fund biofuel projects…

BP is to invest at least £32m in a joint venture with D1 Oils, the quoted UK based alternative fuels company, to develop the inedible oilseed Jatropha as a biodiesel.

The move is the latest escalation of BP’s move into alternative fuels, following its $400m investment in a joint bioethanol plant with Associated British Foods and DuPont announced earlier this week.

Andrew Jack | BP signs second biofuel deal in a week

Meanwhile Grain, an organisation representing poor farmers in developing countries, has devoted the entirety of the latest issue of their journal, Seedling, to savagely lambasting the biofuel industry and exposing the extreme destruction it’s causing. The issue can be downloaded (3.4MB PDF) and I urge anyone with an interest in this subject to do so. The editorial opens as follows…

We are devoting almost all of this edition to a single topic — the rapid expansion of biofuels across much of the globe. In the process of gathering material from colleagues and social movements around the world, we have discovered that the stampede into biofuels is causing enormous environmental and social damage, much more than we realised earlier. Precious ecosystems are being destroyed and hundreds of thousands of indigenous and peasant communities are being thrown off their land. We believe that the prefix bio, which comes from the Greek word for “life”, is entirely inappropriate for such anti-life devastation. So, following the lead of non-governmental organisations and social movements in Latin America, we shall not be talking about biofuels and green energy. Agrofuels is a much better term, we believe, to express what is really happening: agribusiness producing fuel from plants to sustain a wasteful, destructive and unjust global economy.

We begin with an introductory article that, among other things, looks at the mind-boggling numbers that are being bandied around: the Indian government is talking of planting 14 million hectares of land with jatropha; the Inter-American Development Bank says that Brazil has 120 million hectares that could be cultivated with agrofuel crops; and an agrofuel lobby is speaking of 379 million hectares being available in 15 African countries. We are talking about expropriation on an unprecedented scale.

Editorial | Seedling Magazine (3.4MB PDF)

But you don’t need to take the word of Grain. After all, they’re an organisation with the radical agenda of “promot[ing] the sustainable management and use of agricultural biodiversity based on people’s control over genetic resources and local knowledge”. Instead ask the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. They report that “basic food prices for poor countries are being pushed up by competition for land from biofuels” (BBC article). And this is an industry that’s only just getting going! It is absolutely imperative that it doesn’t get much further. Because if the plan is to replace any liquid fossil-fuel shortfall created by a peak in oil production with agrofuels (and certainly that seems to be BP’s plan), then it will almost certainly result in one of the most devastating famines in history. Millions will die. Because wealthy car owners in the USA, UK, Ireland or Japan are able, and willing, to pay more for a tank of jatropha-seed-oil than a Malawian or Ethiopian can afford to pay for a loaf of bread.

And it’s not even as if a switch to agrofuels would help address that other looming crisis — climate change. It will just make that situation worse too.

UPDATE: For lots more info, check out Biofuelwatch (http://www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/)

For me, food miles have become the single biggest factor when I do my weekly shop. They over-ride pretty much all other considerations these days. “Nothing from outside Europe” is the basic rule… broken only very rarely for certain tropical fruit. Usually in a fit of “Goddamn it! Mango is my favourite food! We’re all going to die someday and I’m denying myself my favourite food! It’s right there in front of me, for a price I can afford. I’m surrounded by people buying apples flown in from Chile despite the fact that they’re on a shelf next to some Irish ones and I’m denying myself a single mango. I’m a frakking hair-shirted weirdo! That’s it! I’m buying one!”

And yes, I do use that many exclamation marks when I’m thinking about it.

But by and large I spend time making sure that everything I buy is sourced from as close to me as is possible. I vividly recall standing in the supermarket one afternoon and pointing out to the woman next to me that she was buying Chilean apples rather than Irish ones. I’ll never forget the look of contempt I got… “I’ll buy what I want!” she insisted in brittle tones. There’s a part of me convinced that she now goes out of her way to buy food from the furthest flung corners of the earth just to spite me. She had that kind of look in her eyes and a terrible hiss in her voice.

It’s a little disheartening to say the least; the thought that my watchful attitude towards food miles is now merely balancing out the damage done by saying, “Excuse me, but did you realise that by choosing the Irish apples you’d be doing your part to combat Climate Change?” in as friendly a voice as serious ol’ me is capable.

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as “Buy homegrown. Save the planet. Everyone lives happily ever after.” Because nothing’s ever that simple. Well, almost nothing. In fact it’s questionable as to whether it’s even possible any more. Can Europe grow enough food to support its population? According to the Optimum Population Trust (OPT), for example, it most certainly can’t. They claim that Western Europe’s arable land is only capable of carrying approximately a third of our current population at “present lifestyle”. This number increases to two thirds if we reduce our levels of consumption to what OPT describes as a “modest lifestyle”.

You can download the Excel Spreadsheet containing detailed global numbers, but for a brief flavour of OPT’s calculations; with zero food imports, the UK has a ‘present lifestyle’ carrying capacity of less than one third its current population. Belgium and Luxembourg; one tenth. France; a half. Germany; a quarter. Holland; one eighth. And so on.

The only Western European nations that come even close to being able to support their own populations at current levels of consumption are Finland, Ireland and Sweden. If you reduce consumption to modest levels, you can add Norway and Denmark to that list. The implications are clear… unless Europe reduces its population significantly, it will need to continue to import large amounts of food from Africa and elsewhere just to prevent starvation (note: this is even if we restrict our consumption to sensible / modest levels).

And that’s not the end of the story either. Hypothetically, what if Western Europe was suddenly capable of supporting the current population? Would we find ourselves in the “Buy homegrown. Save the planet. Everyone lives happily ever after.” situation? Sadly not. As this post over at worldchanging (via Gyrus) makes clear, Western Europe’s voracious appetite has led to a large number of poorer nations retooling their entire economy to function as an extension of European arable land. Huge areas of Kenya, for instance, are devoted to growing salad vegetables for European tables. If that market disappears, it will result in significant problems for Kenyan farmers.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that’s a good enough reason for us to be flying mange-tout and sugar-snap peas up from the equator. Frankly when you realise that amongst the nations bordering Kenya are three (Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia) which suffer regular devastating famines, the fact that Kenya is growing baby corn for our salads instead of regular corn to prevent local starvation becomes rather sinister. We all know the old cliché that famine is not a result of food shortages, but is instead a consequence of inequitable distribution and political corruption. Nonetheless, how many of us are aware of our own culpability in this inequity when we buy Kenyan vegetables?

God bless the market, eh? We in Europe can currently pay more to a Kenyan farmer to airlift fresh salad on to our table than an Ethiopian can pay the same farmer — his or her neighbour — to put staple food items on to theirs. As Tim Worstall (blogging economist) so eloquently put it, “Making money from customers is what businesses do, it is the very reason for their existence.” Market capitalism ensures that agriculture is a business like any other. It does not exist to feed the hungry, it exists to generate profit. Market economists see this as a good thing.

I don’t, needless to say. But as I’ve already illustrated, there is no easy solution here. Europe simply cannot grow enough food to feed itself. We could reduce our consumption significantly and still not have enough land. That said, I would nonetheless urge Kenyan farmers to restructure their economy, accept the pay cut, and start to feed their neighbours. Our inability to feed ourselves is our problem, and leaving hundreds of thousands of nameless black people to starve half a world away is not an ethical solution to that problem*.

For now, I shall continue to support Irish farmers 100% (OK, 99.9%… I’ll still buy the occasional mango). And as transportation fuel becomes less abundant, driving the price of imported food ever upwards, it will become easier to do so. But Europe will soon need to face up to this problem of how we feed our massive population. And between peak oil and climate change, it seems unlikely that using Africa and South America as our personal gardens will be an option for very much longer.