The Quiet Road

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 at Bristling Badger, Merrick has been publishing his correspondence with the UK Green Party on the question of whether hydrogen should be pursued as the vehicle fuel of the future (hint: it shouldn’t be).

Needless to say, he’s not made a great deal of headway as yet.

The problem is as simple as it is age-old… namely that the first job of any politician is to take and maintain a position of power. All else is secondary (and that goes for Greens, Reds, Blues and every other colour). No one will get elected if they admit, for example, that part of the only guaranteed solution to our current problems is the abandonment of the private car. Even if it is true. So instead they promise pipe dreams.

In a way this is made even worse when the politician in question claims to have lofty ideals… the nonsense and obfuscation they come out with in order to avoid admitting that their ideals are secondary to their search for power can be stomach-churning to watch.

What is true is that the idea of power corrupts. Power corrupts most rapidly those who believe in it, and it is they who will want it most. Obviously, our democratic system tends to give power to those who hunger for it and gives every opportunity to those who don’t want power to avoid getting it. Not a very satisfactory arrangement if power corrupts those who believe in it and want it.

Perhaps there is no such thing as unilateral power. After all, the man ‘in power’ depends on receiving information all the time from outside. He responds to that information just as much as he ’causes’ things to happen… it is an interaction, and not a lineal situation. But the myth of power is, of course, a very powerful myth, and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it. It is a myth, which, if everybody believes in it, becomes to that extent self-validating. But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to various sorts of disaster.

– Gregory Bateson | Steps To An Ecology of Mind

Here in Ireland we have the Green Party in coalition. The rate at which they have abandoned every single one of their principles is beyond satire and has guaranteed them at least one less vote at the next election. The final nail in their coffin, however, was hammered-in over the weekend when John Gormley, party leader and Minister for the Environment, appeared on the main evening news.

Before I report what he said, let me take you back a year to the Green decision to join the coalition government. By voting for the Greens, which — much to my regret — I did, I believed that I was voting for the manifesto they campaigned on. I realise this was naive of me, but I didn’t really expect them to help prop up the incumbent Fianna Fáil government (whose economic irresponsibility has resulted in a criminal waste of resources). I believed I was helping to propel the Green Manifesto onto the opposition benches where it would be heard but not diluted.

Sure, you’d have to strain to hear it, but it would be there.

Instead the manifesto was abandoned almost wholesale as the Greens rushed into government. In exchange for two ministries and six votes, Fianna Fáil persuaded the Greens to ditch all but one of their commitments. Gormley even justified this decision by claiming that the single-most important issue facing Ireland — facing the world — is Climate Change. Therefore, the Greens would support Fianna Fáil in return for a Programme of Government that included a cast-iron commitment to reduce Ireland’s carbon emissions by a minimum of 3% per year during the lifetime of the government.

That was the deal that was made. I disagreed with it at the time for a bunch of reasons, but mostly because anyone with half a brain (i.e. not someone addled by the desire for power) could tell that the Greens were being bought off with a cheque guaranteed to bounce.

And now it has done. At the end of last week, a report was leaked that demonstrated clearly that not only was this commitment not going to be met, but that Irish carbon emissions had previously been significantly understated and furthermore were actually still rising. So a year after taking power, on their one clear commitment; that single thing we were asked to judge their performance on; the Greens have unequivocably failed.

Gormley, though, appeared on the news to answer this point. His response was predictable and pathetic in almost equal measure. He passed the buck.

I’m not the minister for finance, and I’m not the minister for transport, nor am I the minister for agriculture… so I’m very much dependent on other ministers coming forward.

Amazing stuff. He sold out his manifesto for a seat in government which would enable him to push through emission cuts. It’s only now he’s woken up to the fact that he doesn’t have the power to do a sodding thing about it. I’ve seen him speak; he doesn’t strike me as a stupid man; so how could he have failed to see that one coming? Damn near everyone else did.

The Taoiseach is well-aware of my concerns, as are other ministers, says John. Well that makes it all OK then. He is concerned and everyone is aware of it. All that’s needed now is to develop the technology to convert Mr. Gormley’s concern into clean, zero-emission energy.

Even worse; Mr. Gormley admitted in April this year (in a speech entitled… wait for it… “Putting Vision Into Action”) that he believed we have a “10-year window” to address Climate Change. On the news last weekend he stated that not only would it “be premature” to speculate on the solutions to our emissions growth, but that none of the emission-reduction measures that have so far been put in place in the transport sector would have any significant effect before 2020.

While only a couple of months ago, the Deputy Leader of the Greens, Mary White, was attacking the opposition for their temerity to criticise the environmental record of the government. “Both [opposition] parties”, she insisted, “seem to have forgotten the major steps that the Government has made in tackling the causes of climate change.”

It’s difficult to forget something that never actually happened, Mary.

At the time the Greens entered government I wrote that what concerned me most was not that they’d be ineffective — which was self-evident. My biggest concern would be that they’d deal a significant blow to the environmental movement in Ireland. By allowing people the opportunity of a “fire-and-forget” option, they would severely curtail environmental activism. Those who were concerned about Climate Change could cast their vote and unburden themselves of the responsibility to take further action.

So well done to the Irish Green Party. You have joined a government that is implementing policies guaranteed to raise total emissions. But at least everyone knows how concerned you are.

I have family visiting this week, so blogging will be light-to-nonexistent. All the same, when I checked my email this morning, my friend A had sent me a link to a news item that I thought needed wider dissemination. When reading this report, try not to think about it as limited to a specific environmental problem in a specific geographical area. Instead think about any general lessons that may be learned from this.

Here it is, from the BBC: Australian rivers ‘face disaster’

Thanks to a disastrous decision to rely upon data published by BP, I royally cocked up a calculation involving their Miller Field carbon capture project (see previous post). However, that calculation was preceeded by — in my view — a more important one; an estimate of the amount of atmospheric CO2 emitted by a single barrel of crude oil. Thanks to the kerfuffle surrounding the error in scaling (an error, let me again stress, based upon some bad data from BP), the original calculation is being rather obscured.

In the (probably vain) hope of rescuing it from that obscurity, and due in no small part to a comment on the previous entry which suggests to me that it’s still a useful piece of information, I’ve decided to reproduce it here in isolation. I invite comment and correction, as always.

How much carbon per barrel?

First up, it’s important to realise that crude oil is (almost) never used directly. Instead it’s refined into a wide range of products, 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).

So 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. To get any meaningful figure for CO2 per barrel we’re going to need to do our calculations on the products of crude oil.

It makes sense to perform this calculation on oil that is of average quality (i.e. not some kind of heavy sulphuric sludge or tar-sand) to make it more generally useful. So 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.

All of the other products*** of refined crude have sufficient alternative uses to make it possible (even if not entirely probable) that they will not end up as atmospheric CO2. Of the four grades of fuel listed above, however, it’s fair to say all of it is destined to be burnt. It’s worth noting, therefore, that our final result will represent a minimum CO2 per barrel.

Now, 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 the relevant specific gravity we’ll have a rough “kilogram per barrel” number for each fuel. So:

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.

When fuel oil is burned, it is converted to carbon dioxide and water vapour. Combustion of one kilogram of fuel oil yields 3.15 kilograms of carbon dioxide gas. Carbon dioxide emissions are therefore 3.15 times the mass of fuel burned.

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 a minimum of 317kg of CO2 when consumed.

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.

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.

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?

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.