Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? This well-known Latin phrase from the poet Juvenal, loosely translates to “Who will guard the guards?” It came to mind when thinking about the Talented Mr McCarthy and his oversized shears, better known as An Bord Snip Nua. Regular readers will know that I have a slight ongoing problem with what we refer to as orthodox economics, and its practitioners, our mighty Fifth Estate, the economists.
Whatever degree factory churns them out, our economists mostly march metronomically to the rhythm of the all-seeing Market. Too bad the world has moved on since Milton Friedman was their pin-up boy. Meanwhile, An Bord Snip Nua is cheerfully both diagnosing what ails Ireland Inc, and prescribing our remedial treatment. (more…)
One of my earliest posts on this blog, on December 12, 2007, was headed ‘There is no Plan B‘. The headline was taken from a quote from the then new Australian PM, Kevin Rudd to delegates at the UN climate conference in Bali.
The line re-emerged earlier today, when British PM, Gordon Brown said in London: “This is the moment. Now is the time. For the planet there is no plan B”. He outlined a catastrophic scenario of heatwaves, flooding and droughts if an ambitious new deal is not secured in Copenhagen in December. (more…)
The term Anthropocene was coined by Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen a decade ago to describe the new ‘Era of Man’, a distinct geological epoch shaped almost entirely by our actions and impacts. “The Anthropocence has yet to be accepted as a geological time period, but if it is, it may turn out to be the shortest – and the last”, wrote Bob Holmes in the current edition of New Scientist in an intriguing article that rolls the clock forward to see how Earth would cope in the era after Man.
Mass extinctions are already well advanced, so much so that scientists have already designated the current era as the Sixth Extiction – since these measures cover close to a billion years, Extinction eras are rare indeed, the last being the event 65 million years ago that did for the dinosaurs and ultimately created the wiggle room for our ancient ancestors, the early mammals, to get a toe-hold. (more…)
Let’s hear it for Connie Hedegaard. Connie who? She’s the Danish minister for climate and energy and, crucially, will host the UN-sponsored global climate treaty negotiations in Copenhagen this December.
That puts her in the hottest of hot seats in the next couple of months. Hedegaard is not, by all accounts, your average liberal leftie green. “I never understood why environment should be a left-wing issue”, she says in today’s International Herald Tribune. “In my view, there is nothing as core to conservative beliefs – that what you inherit you should pass on to the next generation”. (more…)
Prices in Ireland have, mercifully, started to ease back from the highs of a year or two ago, yet some things remain extraordinarily cheap. The two things that contribute probably more than anything else to our overall well-being, comfort, security and physical health are electricity and safe drinking water on tap. Yet, the former is dirt cheap and the latter, for most people, doesn’t cost a red cent, no matter how much you use, or whether you leave the taps on 24 hours a day. (more…)
Following last week’s piece, I was more than surprised that neither Tesco nor Unicef Ireland issued any response whatever on the day of publication (Thursday). It wasn’t until the Friday afternoon that Tesco submitted a letter to the Irish Times saying that all had been resolved, etc. Silence from Unicef.
Having tried several times earlier in the week to get hold of either the executive director or the press officer for Unicef Ireland, I went with the statement on their site, dated July 24th, 2009, which gave both barrels to Tesco for it being ravaged by a corporation heartlessly trying to “capitalise on one of our campaigns and subsequently damage an income stream which several of our programmes for children are dependant on”. (more…)
Had been planning to write about the power of the multiples for some time, but what finally pushed me over the edge was a report in The Ticket in last Friday’s Irish Times, to the effect that the DVD cover of the horror/comedy flick ‘Lesbian Vampire Killers’ had been censored at the direction of Tesco, among others.
Not wanting to depend wholly on heresay, I picked up a copy of the film in Tesco in Dun Laoghaire this week, and sure enough, the offending word was discreetly covered with a warning label. The phrase that so offended them was not ‘killers’, rather, it was ‘Lesbian’. Such bizarre prurience, but we’ve seen lots of this from Wal-Mart in the US, bucking to the demands of the Right by actively censoring books, magazines, even newspapers. The threat to the film’s producers, Momentum, was simple enough: either comply, or the all-powerful multiples won’t stock your movie. Resistance is futile. (more…)
Last week, something pretty unusual showed up in a number of national newspapers. This was a full-page advert under the title ‘Spirit of Ireland‘. This tied in with the launch of a website and a big PR push through the national media. You can see the video clip below:
This media programme got a major shot in the arm yesterday with a favourable article in the Irish Times from Prof Ray Kinsella of UCD. “This is the public good as a vital force in transforming, not just our energy supplies and our economic trajectory, but the whole manner in which Ireland, as a community, can function. That, surely, is transformational”, wrote Kinsella, who is especially lavish in his praise for entrepreneur, Graham O’Donnell, the main driver behind the project (with Prof Igor Svets of TCD leading the scientific team).
In a nutshell, Spirit of Ireland is about energy independence. The plan is to replace €30 billion in energy imports over a 10-year period by investing heavily in wind power, backed up by pumped storage (the ESB’s Turlough Hill station in Wicklow has been providing pumped storage since the 1960s, using off-peak electricity to pump the water uphill).
I’ve written at length about the potential – and some of the limitations – of wind energy in the Irish Times. What Spirit of Ireland does is take the positive story and run with it. For that, they are to be commended. In a time of unprecedented economic gloom and low national morale, it’s heartening to see a substantial infrastructural project that isn’t covered with the gombeen fingerprints of Martin Cullen or some of the other intellectual pygmies who have collectively run the ship of state onto the rocks in the last decade and more.
Wind energy is one natural resource Ireland has in abundance. The fact that it’s zero-carbon makes it worth more than oil or gas – if we can figure out how to turn it into a large-scale reliable form of energy. There’s the rub. The winds blow one day, and drop the next. Sometimes, we can be almost totally becalmed for a week at a time. What happens then? Can we really afford to decommission all those carbon-spewing power stations and still expect the lights to stay on?
The Spirit of Ireland proposal harnesses wind with another natural advantage of Ireland: plenty of glacial valleys suitable for conversion to hydro-storage reservoirs (costing around €800 m each to construct).
Not everyone is convinced. I first met Prof Philip Walton, Emeritus professor of physics at UCG at a debate on whether wind or nuclear power offered the best way forward for Ireland. On the night in question, he and I spoke on the same side of the argument (pro-nuclear) in TCD while Minister Eamon Ryan and Frank McDonald of the Irish Times, among others, opposed.
Prof Walton wrote to me today querying the calculations underpinning Spirit of Ireland. He says, for instance, that if “the proposal is to install 6900MW of wind generators which, given a load factor of 35%, would provide an average of about 2400MW of electricity. Our requirement can easily be 5000MW so the proposal would provide less than half of this”.
Of more specific concern is the capacity of stored power: “Using first year college physics one can calculate that this would only provide 5000MW of electricity for less than 11 hours; not very useful if we have calm weather for a week or more”.
The whole idea, says Walton, “is obviously very simplistic and very impractical; to say that it could be achieved in 5 years is mind boggling. While we are right to consider sustainable sources, it is my opinion that renewables alone will not solve our energy problems and that we are on a dangerous road led largely by the Green Party”.
He concludes by warning that “our energy problems will become so serious we must urgently consider all options including renewables, strict conservation measures, nuclear power and the role of the dwindling fossil fuels (though they have CO2 emissions).
Another regular correspondent of mine, Denis Duff, a retired engineer, cautions that we would have to install 18,000 MW of wind energy capacity, at a cost of €35 bn, with an overall project cost of €50 bn, to make this – maybe – work.
I have repeatedly advocated a middle road – of course we should massively invest in wind energy, of course we should aim to sell our surplus power to Europe via an interconnector, but surely we should replace our ‘baseload’ power stations (like Moneypoint) with two or three 1gw nuclear stations? France powers 80% of its national grid on electricity, even the US uses a great deal of nuclear (which is dwarfed by its colossal overall consumption).
Once you get over the planning problems (and we’d better start on emergency legislation to prevent the Nimbys from blocking each and every significant project from here till Doomsday) we could probably have a couple of (very safe) mid-sized nuclear plants whirring away in well under 10 years.
I don’t believe we can afford to sit back and pick and choose which energy options we like and which we don’t. It’s got to be a belt-and-braces approach, i.e. belt on with both wind and nuclear energy projects now, while we still have the chance, and brace for climate and energy impacts that are coming our way a whole lot sooner than people seem to realise.
Politicians worry about the next election; business people worry about the next quarter. Who does that leave to worry about the longer term future? One top scientific expert believes the people who really do think ahead are parents, more specifically mothers. After all, they have to plan years, even decades ahead, when looking at schools and university – and also thinking about the kind of world their young children might inherit.
Dr Jim Hansen is director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and is one of the world’s foremost authorities on climate. He is also a grandfather. Last December he wrote directly to Barack and Michelle Obama about the urgency of the planet’s climate crisis. (more…)
I gave the eco credentials of the Electric Picnic an enthusiastic write up in Thursday’s Irish Times column, describing it as “probably one of the most impressive environmental showcases ever assembled in Ireland”. The theme was taken up later that day on Today FM’s ‘The Last Word’ with Matt Cooper, when I and journalist Kathy Foley joined Cooper in a discussion on whether the Picnic was really just a good old-fashioned piss-up in a field, or could you seriously use it as a place to open a discussion about climate change, peak oil, etc?
As I arrived down to Stradbally in mid-Saturday morning, I ended up listening to a repeat of the radio piece in the Very Last Word, their weekend highlights show. It seemed like the right place to be hearing this; now all I had to do was find my way around the place (easier said than done, as it transpired) but I did manage to locate the ‘Rethink Tank’, a dome-shaped enclosure within the ‘Global Green’ area of the Picnic. (more…)
And so the G-8 Summit draws to a close in Japan. This Group of Eight major nations somehow manages to exclude from membership both India and China, which between them account for more than a third of humanity, as well (in China’s case anyhow) as the up-and-coming industrial powerhouse of the world. It’s quite the exclusive club, this G8.
Great news then that they took the massive step forward of promising to “do something” about climate change at some future point, ideally between now and 2050. This takes the form of a ‘long term commitment to halving emissions by mid-century. This has been described as a ‘shared vision’ – as ambiguous a phrase as any you’re likely to hear from the lips of a politician. (more…)
Once upon a time, the phrase ‘green’ implied wide-eyed extremism. You know the types, living in the trees in the Glen of the Downs or rolling in the mud at some bizarre eco hug-in festival in deepest rural Roscommon.
Yes, just as the Dutch wear clogs, the Swiss love their cuckoo clocks and the Irish are all violent alcoholics, so anyone who gives a toss about the world in which we live and which our children shall inherit is an unemployable treehugger. QED. (more…)
