Coal, the greenest fuel

The insane obsession with both wind and solar PV technologies, both hugely expensive and producing tiny yields of power, ignores the greenest technology of all, one for which we have massive existing reserves, and one that can be developed locally at relatively low cost - coal pyrolysis. Simply, this is heating coal without allowing it to burn, and capturing both the volatiles given off and the hard waste remaining. One of the UK's last coal pyrolysis plants, at Carrickfergus, is shown below. Even non-engineers can see how simple it is. 

About half of the gas output is Hydrogen and 35% Methane. Hydrogen is the real vehicle fuel of the future, and Methane can go straight to existing domestic supplies. Carbon monoxide is also produced; this can be hydrolised with Hydrogen to make Methanol, used to produce biodiesel. By-products include coke and coal tar. Coke can be burned as a smokeless fuel in domestic fireplaces, and coal tar can be further distilled to provide a range of useful products. There are small amounts of Sulphur (Sulphuric acid for batteries) and Ammonia (fertilisers and explosives) produced. Pretty much everything can be used.


Coal. The greenest energy source.

Tread softly, but carry a big stick

Nick Drew's piece should be read widely. And H/T Nick for this Economist piece. 

Well what do you bloody imagine they're for?

Kropotkin and Europe: Co-operation through conflict

Most informed commentators in the Sundays are of the opinion that if the Euro-17 plan fails, Europe will fail and we'll all return to the dark ages, as competing nation-states impoverishing themselves in competition (or war) with no winners. It's a bleak scenario, a Darwinian competition, an Ayn Rand world of pure selfishness and the pursuit of self-interest in which the most ruthless and best-equipped win. Yet such a scenario flies in the face of all nature and all human experience. And herein is the paradox of altruistic self-interest. 


Kropotkin, better known as an anarchist than as a biologist, observed that the species that survived and flourished were those where there was co-operation between individuals who otherwise competed for food, mates and territory. Modern research has confirmed this to be true even at the level of the microbe; that 'altruistic' co-operation amongst competing individuals provided greater benefit than pure conflict. And scientists have reconciled this with Darwinism - the fittest are those who are able to benefit from reciprocal co-operation. 


In 1980 Robert Axelrod carried out a large-scale experiment with players adopting strategies suggested by fellow academic game-theorists in a 'prisoners' dilemma' situation. The winning strategy was Anatole Rapoport's 'Tit for Tat' This provided a better chance for survival than anything else. The strategy has the following characteristics;

• Be nice: cooperate, never be the first to defect.
• Be provocable: return defection for defection, cooperation for cooperation.
• Don't be envious:: be fair with your partner.
• Don't be too clever: or, don't try to be tricky.

Users of BitTorrent will recognise the strategy as applied in regular unchoking; selfish participants are punished, reciprocal co-operators are rewarded. But can this be applied to competing nation-states, where conflict may mean war? And how does the EU fit in here?


Well , the EU is an organisation that not only allows but encourages free riders, with no sanctions for nations that cheat or don't play fairly. In evolutionary terms, such a group will not succeed - all members will achieve less than in a group that applies effective sanctions to non-conformers, where defectors are punished by co-operators. The mutual powers that the EU-17 are belatedly seeking, of direct control over national fiscal management, are exactly the powers of sanction that could make the bloc work. The paradox is that each member of the 17 must remain fundamentally in competition with all the others. It's a circle that can't be squared. 


Europe's real future and best chance of survival may actually be as 27 nations whose economies and currencies are competing against eachother, co-operating in conflict.  

Guy Fawkes Day

It is quite right of course that the nation today commemorates Guy Fawkes, who today stands alongside Robin Hood as an iconic national hero who did his bit to free Britain of tyranny. As an effigy of the Speaker of the House of Commons is burned on countless bonfires across the land, and Squeaker Bercow, like Gorbals Mick before him, disappears in a shower of flames and sparks, the British people make their annual reminder to the political class to beware. 

Sorry, you can't change history

During my lifetime the African continent has made the most phenomenal social advances. In the cities with power supplies, refrigerators, aircon units and televisions equip even the humblest shanty or shack; cellphones have enabled those cities to avoid the 'copper cage' telecoms stage altogether, and cheap jet travel from city to city has bypassed the expense of building roads and railways. The death-toll from simple preventable disease has plummeted. Something else is noticeable as well; modern Africans all wear Western-style clothes that cover their breasts and genitals. 


It must be extraordinarily difficult for today's young people to imagine the African continent as it was in the 1950s and 1960s. It was the staple of our childhood cinema and television; Armand and Michaela Denis were household names, we never missed an episode of 'Daktari' (with Clarence the cross-eyed Lion), and every other wildlife documentary was set in the great rift valley or on the savannah. Africans were of two distinct types. Firstly were the educated, Westernised inheritors of Empire who shared our values system and our tailors. Then there were all the primitive village folk, in loincloths with bone earrings, who were variously porters, unskilled labour or wildlife poachers. Grinning women with huge swinging dugs and infants on their hip waited table, and blokes with flapping todgers ran around the place joy-shrieking. The nudity was, quite frankly, what made these programmes and documentaries interesting to a young English chap. 


All the academic and historical evidence supports this depiction as more authentic than not. Not everywhere, of course; not in the nascent cities, nor in places with the lengthiest history of colonisation or civilisation. But generally in that swath of the continent south of Addis Ababa, north of Pretoria and east of Kinshasa.  


Instead of trying to censor history, we should celebrate that the people of that continent have advanced so far in so short a period of time. You really can't overlay the present on the past with any degree of academic honesty. 

Eurotank crushes Greek democracy

As an object lesson in the power that the EU can bring to bear when threatened, George Papandreou is feeling the full force. He is being crushed by a cabal of thwarted Euro-Socialism through his own PASOK party and every member of the Euro-Socialist PES grouping, including Mzz Ashton and five other Commissioners and significant numbers from the European Council, Council of Europe and European Parliament. PASOK supplies 8 MEPs and the Fisheries Commissioner, Maria Damaniki, all of whom are furious at Papandreou for threatening their comfortable existences. The truth has never been so obvious that these people are a class apart, willing to sacrifice their own nations and peoples on the altar of EuroFederalism and for their own deeply corrupt self-interest.


However, the Referendum is out of the bottle now and it won't be as easy to get it back in. If Papandreou resigns and the Referendum is cancelled, I predict fury on the streets of Athens. These are serious times indeed. 

Will Kelly damn UKIP?

I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the future centre of gravity of British politics will be determined by the way in which the recommendations of Sir Christopher Kelly's committee into party finance are implemented. Peter Oborne reminds us in the Telegraph this morning that UKIP could be set to become the third force in Parliament, replacing the Lib Dems. Oho. Not if Kelly repeats Hayden Phillips' deeply corrupt and undemocratic  funding recommendation they won't.


Phillips recommended that parties get £3 each year for each vote cast for them in the last election. This favours incumbency, favours the existing party triumverate, locks in stasis (mandarins would call this 'stability') and mitigates against any new parties gaining recognition. The Lib Dems would be funded on the basis of their 2010 high, not their 2011 lows, and would go into the 2015 election with a wholly corrupt advantage, and keep the balance of the political centre on the left. Never mind that forty-five millions of electors are given no say in whether they want tax funds to go to the parties - making the move also a deeply and dangerously anti-democratic one.


Kelly will no doubt conveniently ignore, as did Phillips, the proposal made by Helena Kennedy's 'Power' Inquiry some years ago now. This was for a separate funding poll slip to be taken into the voting booth; electors could select any party to receive £3 a year of tax funds, not necessarily the one they were voting for, or could choose none at all. Thus voters who object to tax funds being given to parties could veto funding made in their name, and electors could make an intelligent choice about whether to fund UKIP whilst voting Conservative, or to fund the LibDems whilst voting Labour. It was a fair and equitable proposal, and therefore deeply unwelcome to the mandarins and to the State political class. 


But make no mistake. The Kelly report will be the most important thing that happens in British politics this year. 

There's only one story today

It won't last until a Greek referendum in January. There's doubt it will last until the end of the month. The Euro-stitch up is coming unravelled faster than a cheap sweater from Asda. China has snubbed invitations to buy up Euro debt, and even the US is rattled. Yet Greece comes somewhere in the global GDP league between Denmark and Columbia - hardly a major league player. 


The demise of the Euro was inevitable. The only question was when. It seems it might be 'now'. 

Votes for the Dead?

John Donne may find some philosophical comfort in it, Wellington and Nelson will no doubt agree that a whiff of grape would shift 'em whilst poor Ethelred will not have made up his mind yet. 

Thanks to the Telegraph for this. 

One Nation

The times are certainly a-changing, perhaps more rapidly than at any time I can recall. Take the rewards of the most senior figures in our society, the Supreme Court judges, Generals, university Vice Chancellors. They can expect a working life in which the 'relativities' are maintained with a chauffeured car and a domestic servant as part of the job and in retirement no-one is much surprised to find them in a spoof-Lutyens house in Hampshire of the kind that requires a ride-on lawnmower. Fair enough. Yet these people were the 'Establishment', the privileged elite, the ruling class, against whom we protested in the 1970s through music and satire. Now their rewards - and status - are as nothing compared to those that head and manage the transnational corporates; they are as far below an investment banker in income terms as an unemployed teen is below a GP. 


And this is what's happened since the 1970s; a new class of the global super-rich has grown almost without notice, and with them a top-tier of earners in the City and global finance, and the CEOs, skimming the cream off the assets they manage for anyone in a pension fund or with investments. The fact that it's not their money that enables some 140 corporates to control 60% of invested wealth is an irrelevance - it's the fact that global corporates act solely for their own ends that matters. The nurses and teachers whose pension funds they manage (rapaciously) don't share in any increased quality of life, don't even get a sniff of the wealth and privilege that those who invest 20% of their earnings enjoy. 


As Mary Riddell comments in the Telegraph, for the first time both main parties have picked up the zeitgeist.  There is a national recognition that these rewards are too great, the differentials too wide, that these folk have piled wealth upon wealth for themselves just because they can. Though the MSM tags the 'occupy' protests as anti-capitalist they're not; they're anti-corporatist. And if they're against globalisation they're not protectionist; they oppose the way in which international capital can dodge and evade national regulation, not the idea of 'a fair go' for any nation in the global marketplace. Above all they're a reminder that 'One Nation' finds a deep resonance in the English soul.