Energy Insecurity

Energy security is a mantra often repeated by politicians but those who mindless call for energy security fail to understand just how complex the process of providing energy to a nation has become and just how many different hands are on the valves, switches or taps that can turn off or on the supplies, according to their policy of self-betterment and greed.

Follow the Money

Scandals about the conditions in which people who work in third world countries are frequent. The latest scandal claims Apple exhausts the workers who make its products in China and uses (indirectly) child labour to work in dangerous mines in Indonesia. When the BBC made a programme about these thing Apple circulated its UK staff with words which included 

They’ve Got the Whole World in their Hands

Mr Xi and Mr Obama run the two wealthiest countries in the world. The former is undemocratically elected and the latter elected by a very flawed democratic system. Both have power and can use their power for good or for evil.

Is the Dollar in Danger of losing its Reserve Currency Status?

China will be buying Russian natural gas in ever increasing quantities. Both nations will benefit from the trade, but the trade will be ground breaking in one particular way. China will almost certainly pay for the gas not in US dollars, but in Roubles or Yuan. I doubt if either Russia or China will want to buy and sell dollars to trade in natural gas. For economic reasons as these economies become stronger in their own right as well as becoming relatively stronger than the American economy then neither Russia nor China will want to hold too many dollars.

Russia, China and Future Growth

Ten years ago conventional business wisdom was that if you had to make something you moved the production to China and invested (directly or indirectly) in production facilities in China. Today the position has almost reversed. Production in China has been so profitable that Chinese businesses are encouraged and urged to invest their profits in business in the United States, the European Community and other parts of the world. The Chinese economy has transformed from a branch of the western economy to an economic centre in its own right.

It is worth sacrificing some money and prosperity for an improvement in things that cannot be measured in money

As China struggles to overcome levels of air pollution that compare with the worst pea souper fogs and smogs of former industrial Britain, I conclude that there is no free lunch and that economic growth has its pitfalls and problems as well as its advantages.  

That Rubbish Tip at the Back of the Garden

China is a large country where many people live. For the past few decades it has opened factories while the developed nations have closed factories because things can be made cheaply in China. As a result the productivity in China has increased, along with economic growth and as surely as night follows day when rapid economic growth occurs so emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases rise inexorably to increasingly dangerous levels.

Environmental Trade Wars

The European Union and China are in dispute about photo-voltaic panels made in China and sold in the EU. The EU complains that the panels, which produce electricity during daylight, are being dumped ion the European market, being sold at prices that are significantly below cost and proposes to impose a duty of 47% on imported panels from China. China protests its innocence to the dumping charge and claims that any duty would hurt consumers.

Climate Change – Suspending your Disbelief

Let us all for the purposes of argument accept the view that climate change is human induced. For many that seems to be a big thing to accept. I find it odd that many people refuse to accept the advice of the majority of specialists in this field, which is that climate change is induced by human behaviour and activity. However, if you are one of those who refuse to believe the advice of experts in this matter, then please try to suspend your disbelief for the purposes of this essay.

If you have suspended your disbelief then let us see where, following the expert’s advice, takes us.

Climate change is a threat. The extent of the threat and the damage that it will produce depends upon two things. The first thing is just how much the climate will change. A warming across the world of three or four degrees Celsius will provide conditions which will seriously damage the ability of much of the world’s population to live in many places on this planet.

The second threat is the time factor; how long that human induced climate change will last is a great potential problem. If we could reverse climate change after a few decades then climate change would fall into one of those categories of things that Malthus thought were events which acted as a way of reducing human population growth. Like war, famine, drought and pestilence, climate change would wipe out a few billion people, leaving those who survived the ability to live within the resources that the earth provides, after the climate had settled into the status quo ante. Mr Scrooge was unkind when talking of removing the surplus population, but that is what nature seems to do, from time to time.

Let us imagine (your disbelief still suspended) that we all reached the conclusion that not only is the world a spherical object but that climate change is human induced by large emissions of carbon dioxide, and we actually stopped emitting carbon dioxide in a few decades time. By then the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide would be more than 450 parts per million. It may be as high as 600 parts per million depending on how quickly nations like China and India are able to grow economically. If ninety per cent of the population of those countries live in the same way as ninety per cent of the population of the developed world live, then atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide will be very high.

So we then would have very high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and would have stopped emitting more carbon dioxide, having seen the effects of the emissions that we have already created. The carbon dioxide gradually reduces in the atmosphere but the climate does not return to how it was because another factor comes into play. There would be a slower loss of heat to the ocean, which has become warmer, which would keep atmospheric temperatures high for at least another one thousand years, according to studies of the processes which remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.  That is simply the way the chemistry works. http://www.pnas.org/content/106/6/1704.full?sid=669208dd-ab62-4928-bfcb-84dab5548f65

The are other factors which delay the reversing of climate change, the most significant is probably the rainfall changes which will come with climate change. It is easy to spoil something but hard to repair the damage. You may now stop suspending your disbelief and I how that you will ask yourself “I believe that climate change is not human induced…but what if I am wrong?”

Record Carbon Dioxide Emissions from Energy in 2010

The big news of the month of May came at its very end. The International Energy Agency estimates that carbon dioxide emissions due to energy – heat and electricity – rose to a record level in 2010. In 2009 emissions from these sources fell, due to the financial crisis, but since the recovery emissions are on the rise and were 5% higher than the previous record year in 2008. These are records of shame, recording the first steps of our descent into self destruction.