Another thing about climate change (which, sadly, pushes me towards the 'Que Sera Sera' school of action): as a species, we're not built to deal with change on this kind of scale. Various despots may have made shouty commitments to a thousand year reign, but then they've failed. Its not so much collapse or survival that intrigues me. It's just that the kind of time the planet lives in is on such a different order of magnitude than anything we can grasp, either individually or as a community. It's as if the permanent resident bacteria on our skin started a campaign to to stop us showering next morning. A lovely piece of writing on the permanence of the planet's skin:

Such mountains surround us like some fundamental border between the homeland and the strange land. Life springs from them, flows out and down and away to the weary plains but they remain, altering at a slow pace that enables us to make them our symbols of permanence, if not of eternity. Sheep graze them bald. Their lower slopes are trenched by prairie-buster ploughs, then blanked over with the dark trees of government. A duke or a queen commands the servants to blast a scar of a track across the mountain's face so that the rich may lurch across it in the autumn and leave the grouse dying dabbled in their own rowan-red blood... The mountains are neutral about all this. We gut them for their congealed metals, rive off whole masonries of limestone or slate, tread their weaknesses into running sores that will never heal while our civilisation lasts... They are above it all.

The Guardian knows me so well! It talks here about their new initiative, Tread Lightly:

many people still have doubts about whether they can achieve much of an impact, and nowhere are these doubts aired so loudly as when it comes to lowering our carbon footprints. Like a dieter justifying one more chocolate biscuit, the excuses flow all too easily - why should I bother when China and India's emissions will engulf our own efforts? Why should I bother when the US refuses to sign up to Kyoto?

Johann Hari has been taking part in the Heathrow protest camp: the result is a fine article in the Indepedent. (Article pasted here coz the Indy's links cost money after a certain amount of time.)

A couple of things leapt out:

I recognise an undercover journalist from a right-wing newspaper. "This is terrible!" he says "I've been sent to find stories about drug-addicted layabouts and they're all nice people with PhDs."

and

When I see the police seizing bags and thrusting cameras into the faces of these peaceful people, I keep comparing it in my mind to the policing of fuel protests back in 2000. A group of truckers, enraged that their God-given right to burn cheap oil was being infringed by mildly green taxes, brought Britain to a standstill. Supermarket shelves emptied; people began to panic. Through it all, the police did nothing, treating the barricaders like mildly naughty children. The very newspapers now damning direct action as "undemocratic" and "disgusting" cheered them on. So according to the police and the right-wing press, protesting to speed up global warming is fine, even if it causes food shortages; but protest to halt global warming and you become a mini Bin Laden.

The Grauniad reports today on a study that shows shifting to biofuels 'will release between two and nine times more carbon gases over the next 30 years than fossil fuels'. This is because forest will generally be cleared to grow it. That forest, combined with the fossil fuel the biofuel would have replaced, equals less carbon than no forest and biofuel production. Also:

Britain is committed to substituting 10% of its transport fuel with biofuels under Europe-wide plans to slash carbon emissions by 2020... Around 40% of Europe's agricultural land would be needed to grow biofuel crops to meet the 10% fossil fuel substitution target.

So, of course, there'll be enormous pressure to outsource it. One author of the study noted: 'Brazil, Paraguay, Indonesia among others have huge deforestation programmes to supply the world biofuel market.'

Monbiot's been saying this for a while, but its still interesting to see more evidence. The authors point out that it means going the biofuel route is 'a mistake in climate change terms.' The thing is, evidence isn't likely to stop the biofuel juggernaut. In the US, for example, it'll be the same farming lobby growing it that also quite happily gets the US government to buy its surplus crop and ship it to developing countries, buggering up their local markets in the process, with 'a gift from the American people' stencilled on the bags.

Though perhaps combatting climate change isn't the main motivation: maybe its simply pre-empting the oil running out so that our economies can carry on regardless, while maybe getting out of the Middle East. It makes the relationship between powerful and weak countries considerably more transparent, though, doesn't it? You stick to farming and grow our fuel for us, because there's no way we have the land to do it ourselves.

The economics of it is entirely sound, of course. It just means that some places have a comparative advantage in growing car-food because they have more land. Then they'll have dollar and can afford to buy some food for themselves. That is, if they can afford to buy any because human-food crops have rocketed up in price, in line with car-food crops. Ah, but it'll be OK, coz the US can carry on dumping its unwanted grain on them.

This story on Boeing's new plane, the 787 'dreamliner', caught my eye - initially because my brother is on the team designing its engines. But then I read the story: Boeing are boasting about the green credentials of the new plane. But, of course (as the article points out) more efficient planes doesn't equal less greenhouse gases. It equals cheaper flights - so more people will fly.

I don't know what percentage of the overall cost of flying is accounted for by fuel, mind. It might be miniscule. It would certainly seem unlikely it's the prime economic driving force for its expansion. But its nevertheless sobering to think that any gains in efficiency will merely contribute to increased demand.

Just speaking to me ol mutha on da blowa; she tells me John Travolta has his own jumbo jet. I say, nah. She sez, yeah! I say, no fookin way. She sez, really, I say... hang on, I'll consult the all-knowing oracle. Lo an behold, two clicks away from 'travolta google earth' an I'm lookin at the man's Boeing 707 ex-Qantas airline jumbo fookin jet, that he flies him fookin self - parked next to his fookin swimming pool. Look at the little iddy biddy car next to it. He probably doesn't vote Green.

Bigger image if you right-click and view image (in Firefox anyhoo. No idea how Mmmm... Mi... Expl... expl... that other one works.)

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I happened to catch Gardeners Question Time today as I was eating my beans on toast. Apparently, there’s a ‘crisis’ hitting panel fencing in the UK. Supplies have totally dried up due to bad production conditions in Russia and Scandinavia. The head of the British Association of Fencing (or something like that) explained that there’s just no panel fencing anywhere. The major DIY stores have removed it from their catalogues; fencing companies are facing having to lay staff off; people are ‘panic buying’.

See: global warming may yet make the people of Chipping Norton realise their common bond with the dispossessed and warring peoples of Darfur. Both driven to extremes: the Janjaweed, baked off their land by rising temperatures, beguiled by al-Bashir to carry out awful deeds; the poor folk of the Home Counties hit by crisis, forced to drive up to sixty miles in search of new panelling to replace those that blew down during the winter – and even then, they find nothing. Nothing! Those damn panic buyers…

The head of the British Association of Fencing has suggested the following: look for something else to do in the garden. And above all try not to panic.

Note: not that global warming actually has anything to do with the shortage, as far as I know. But I shan't let that get in the way of taking the piss out of middle England.

MySociety reported this week that Chris Lightfoot has died. I hadn't heard of him until now, but there were a few links to some of his work, and his blog. There's some amazing stuff. First off are the travel time maps - fantastic way to illustrate the cost of travel, and why building new roads may lead to more traffic as the cost of a particular route drops. It would be good to include such cost decisions in any geographical economic model. I made such a decision myself last week, paying one pound for two blank CDs from a local shop. When they told me the price, I left the shop, but on the way past going back home, the cost of waiting and of travelling to buy in bulk seemed too much: I wanted to use them that night. Less trivially would be the cost of getting food via car versus foot. (And the emergent effects of this: car travel is one of Putnam's main causes of the decline in Social Capital in the US.)

Anyway, it's Chris' version of the political compass - the political survey 2005, based on youGov data - I found most affecting. He discusses here the problems he had with the original political compass site, and here he puts the findings from the political survey in some context.

Here's my results from answering the 32 questions. Chris used principle components analysis to reduce the many dimensions of these questions to the two axes of the political compass. I'm not entirely clear if this method can account for the Iraq war question being on the economics axis, but I'm presuming so. (The comments in his blog post above have a lot of good thoughts on the pitfalls of the questionnaire and the methods used.)

The most striking thing is seeing oneself in relation to others. There's a little dot: 'you are here'. Eek.

At the very least, we have a desperate future. Our children may never believe that we had surplus food. It is mainly because of utterly ridiculous things. The entire output of atomic power in the United States is exactly equivalent to the requirements of the clothes-drying machines.

I literally can’t stand being on the American highway. To me it is almost like being in a prison of madness. I can stand the background; but I can’t stand the highways in Canada or here. Driving like crazy people. Where are they going? And why are so many of them going in that direction? They are all fleeing something. I would like to inquire what is in those trucks that are tearing down the road. Is it something of no use at all? Or something which is present where it is going? And often I have seen trucks, apparently carrying identical cargo, going in opposite directions, carting it here and there. The drivers tell me that they are carrying widgets.

Now all of this, including the energy problem, is what we have to tackle at once. It can be done. It is possible. It is possible to make restitution. We might as well be trying to do something about it as not. We will never get anywhere if we don’t do anything. The great temptation, and one in which the academic takes total refuge, is to gather more evidence. I mean, do we need any more evidence? Or is it time to cease taking evidence and to start remedial action on the evidence already in? In 1950, it was time to stop taking evidence and start remedial action. But the temptation is always to gather more evidence. Too many people waste their lives gathering evidence. Moreover, as we get more evidence, we see that things are worse than they had appeared to be.

From An Introduction to Permaculture by Bill Mollison.

A comment below a Monbiot article...

I evade my personal responsibility for the things I choose to do. I blame the government, the oil companies, George Bush, the economy, the wealthy and anybody else I can think of for the destruction that my lifestyle causes.

I put my comfort, my convenience and my conformity ahead of the lives and livlihoods of thousands of future generations, and I try not to think too much about my daily contribution to the destruction of the world that was left to me by thousands of past generations. I put myself far, far ahead of my ancestors and decendents and take from them for the most trivial of reasons.