Reply To: Cap and Trade

[Phil’s Dad]

Breakable – you posted at 24 September 2009 03:55 AM
“…if there is even a remote possibility that by a slight reduction (in) the quality of living a catastrophe can be prevented isn’t it a good idea to take that chance?”
Then at 26 September 2009 07:21 AM
“I do not think its(sic) a good idea to reduce the quality of living anywhere…”

I’ll let you untangle that one. 🙂

(“Its” by the way is the possessive. “It’s” is the contraction of “it is”. Pedantry – sorry.)

You then give two examples to make your point (for which I applaud you by the way)

Shawn Frayne’s invention is years old and Trevor Baylis in the mean time created the wind up radio and lamp that need no external power source and can be found in large numbers on the African continent. This is not the sort of power villages are in desperate need of.

William’s story is as inspirational as it is intended to be and deeply saddening at the same time. I applaud anyone who creates something from no more than their ingenuity and what they find around them. Do though remember this telling line from the write up; “Three years ago I came across a fascinating story of a young man in Malawi who had built a windmill from scratch… Breakable, how many more have been built since?

Africa is home to getting on for a billion people. Only 10% have regular energy supplies. Nor is it evenly distributed. In some African countries 95% go without. Are there enough dumps with enough spare parts to energize a continent in this way?

Instead many spend their time gathering grass, dung and, where available, wood for cooking and heating. Four million die each year from the lung infections that result. W.H.O. figures indicate that this is forty times higher than the number of smoking-related deaths. The greatest effect is felt by women and children.

Without the power to pump clean water, what can be found is carried home, often from distant lakes and rivers. Yes it could be done with wind powered water pumps if the wind blows with the right strength at the right time. But again it will not be done for a billion people from spare bicycle parts. When you start considering “proper” wind turbines the cost is immediately out of reach.

Tainted water and spoiled, unrefrigerated, food cause intestinal diseases that kill another two million annually. These things alone are killing numbers equivalent to the population of London or New York, every year, as a direct result of the absence of practical, affordable energy. Right now “practical, affordable” means hydrocarbons which has its own problems. This is why FF is so important. The cost per kW/hr is within the reach of people for whom $1 can mean the difference between life and death as you put it.

To set this in the context of cap & trade; the most major of the world wide environmental initiatives to date, the Kyoto Protocol, would apparently keep two million people from going hungry by the end of the century. A third of the number that will die, this year, from lack of energy. As I posted earlier there are top evangelists for the environmentalist view who do not think cap & trade will achieve even this much.

Other environmental initiatives have actually made matters worse. In recent years the colossal increase in bio-fuel crops, which effectively put food into cars, drove up food prices. The World Bank states that this has driven at least 30 million more people into hunger.

As a politician I am very much aware that politics is in large part responsible for what I have described above. As such I am clear that we must not make matters worse still with more politics. To those who say we must reduce world energy consumption as a route to reducing CO2; I would ask them to consider that unnecessarily limiting or withholding energy damages peoples’ lives and, in some cases, takes those lives away. By all means let us develop low carbon, high energy economies but please not low carbon, low energy.

In developed nations by all means secure energy supplies by developing local alternatives to imported oil and gas. Do not under any circumstances waste resources. But before suggesting that developed nations reduce their energy usage – please take a long hard look at countries that are low energy today.

It is not sufficient to say “we will do this because of what might happen in the future if temperature goes up 1oC” when we know full well what will happen if we continue energy deprivation. It will be every bit as bad or even worse. To put it harshly, do we let someone die now on the off chance we might save someone later?

Sorry this is so long but you touched a raw nerve. >:-(

Just to tie up a loose end; at 24 September 2009 03:55 AM you say “Consensus is much harder to form when there is nothing to test on.” And at 26 September 2009 07:21 AM “It is much easier to disprove criticism when you can make experiments”.

From your second, perfectly logical, statement (made when well rested) we can form the double negative – it is much harder to disprove criticism when you can not “make experiments”. For all the same reasons it is harder to disprove consensus (i.e. easier to form and maintain) when there is nothing to test on. Or, to take out the double negative, consensus is much easier to form when there is nothing to test on.
You see how that makes much more sense. 🙂