niq’s soapbox

We know that the powers-that-be can’t do joined-up thinking and come up with coherent policies.

The coincidence of two news items today illustrates this rather clearly:

• Congestion charging for Manchester.
• Social and Economic benefits of a much-improved broadband infrastructure.

Manchester’s proposed congestion charge will, at best, work like London’s. That’ll only happen if there’s consistent political will to make it work. It needn’t take more than one person in a key management position to scupper it, and turn it into an expensive fiasco. Think “Sir Humphrey”, though if he opposed a proposal he’d (one hopes) at least stop it before spending billions on it. But at best, congestion charging is a poor substitute for John Major’s fuel price escalator.

Coupled with the congestion charge will be a huge investment in public transport. That is, public investment: the state poking its nose in. We’ll pour billions of taxpayers money into providing more inefficient and polluting transport so we can move ever more heavy, reluctant bodies on their daily journey to the cubicle. Public transport should be less polluting than private, but that’s not automatic. Even if they get it right it’s a marginal improvement, and massive public investment is a great way to get it wrong.

Meanwhile, also today, the Broadband Stakeholder Group’s report points to benefits such as flexible working, lifelong learning, and a big impact on social exclusion. Now that’s an altogether better way to invest large sums of public money. Instead of one city catching up with where it should’ve been maybe two generations ago (by European standards), the whole country can catch up with where it should be NOW!

Actually I don’t think public money should go into broadband either, except at the fringes to ensure universal basic availability. Let the market do that, and let it compete honestly with old-fashioned transport. With energy much more realistically priced than it has been for a couple of generations, efficiency will soon win. Sustainably.

Stop subsidising last century’s solutions!

Was it not Martin Luther King who said we should judge a man “not by the colour of his skin, but by the content of his character“? When faced with a report saying “Obese blamed for the world’s ills“, I say it’s time we invoked the great man’s rhetoric. Judge me not by the amplitude of my girth, but by the content of my character!

When I heard of the report, my first reaction was to try and seek out the original. Failing that, I thought I’d leave it: the news reports probably misrepresent it anyway. But then today out cycling up Dartmoor, I met a chap even more rotund than myself on a bike, and looking plenty fit enough for Dartmoor’s hills, and thought maybe this is at least blogworthy. This kind of report - judging people for what they are - is perilously close to the kind of prejudice Dr King’s people suffered.

I’m a fatty, so I eat 18% more calories than average?

Probably guilty as charged, though I eat a small fraction of what I did in my youth, before the middle-age spread set in. But against that, the fact I don’t eat meat must surely in itself put my dietary carbon footprint well below the developed-world average.

But more than that: I’m sure my good layer of natural organic insulation is one reason I don’t need to heat my environment in the English winter. Not the only reason: the fact that I’m fit and healthy helps, as does my youth when the cost of heating was out of the question, meaning I got used to nature’s temperatures. But anyway, I have no doubt that my layer of fat more than pays for itself in carbon emissions saved.

And I drive an excessive amount?

Definitely not guilty: the last time I drove was a little over three years ago, when I hired a van for a day to move house. I use a combination of bicycle and public transport for all my travel. More importantly, I make efforts to avoid unnecessary travel, particularly that western-country ritual of commuting, which I have eliminated altogether from my life. To cap it all, my life’s work is dedicated to developing the infrastructure for many more people - in principle everyone in the knowledge economy - to be able to avoid much of their travel.

So I guess I’m guilty of being portly, just as Dr King was guilty of being black. I don’t see that either of us has anything to be ashamed of!

On Tuesday night, staying in a guest house in Camberley, I got a taste of Surrey’s good side.  The guest house is situated in parkland, with some major sources of noise and pollution at a distance.  From my bedroom, I could hear the M3 and the Heathrow flight path, but both were no more than gentle background noises.  I could also hear an owl, and later the dawn chorus.

Tonight, too, I can hear an owl here in Tavistock.  I think my night in Camberley must have sensitised me to the sound.  But normally I just don’t notice it, as it’s very faint compared to some of the less pleasant human-generated noises.

It just goes to show, in terms of wellbeing, what matters most is the immediate surroundings.  It can be in-town or in the country, but if it’s sufficiently peaceful it’s nice, whereas if it’s exposed to too much pollution it’s stressful and nasty.

I guess that’s heavily reflected in house prices.  Maybe I can get somewhere quiet by paying £200/month more in rent.

In a comment on my recent blog entry, Mads points to water-cooled systems from Sun.  In another comment, John mentions a project he’s involved in that may or may not get the goahead to harness heat from a data centre.

Following Mads’s link, I see Sun claims its watercooled systems to 40% more efficient than some alternative - presumably one that would be equivalent in functional terms.  Whilst 40% may be better than nothing, it’s still a helluva lot of waste.  You could say you waste 50% more than you save.  What is missing from Sun’s pages is any suggestion of harnessing that energy and putting it to good use.

What Sun should produce, and what could make the decision much easier for John’s project, is systems in which capturing and re-using waste heat is integral.  A plumber should be able to able to plug them in to a normal heating system, just as they would another heat source like a boiler or immersion heater.  That is a paradigm shift in computer design, and it is indeed manufacturers such as Sun who are best-placed to take the lead in it.

On a smaller scale, manufacturers of desktop and home computers could perhaps do something similar.  A computer with builtin water cooling, that could be plugged in to the cold water supply feeding a domestic water tank.  So the computer’s waste heat goes into the household or office heating/hot water, and less energy is required from conventional sources.  The cooling system is plumbed in, but the computer’s innards need to be accessible so components can be changed whenever necessary.

In the case of desktop-replacements, that’ll work best where the water tank is within bluetooth range of the desk for connecting peripherals.  But if the idea takes off, we’ll soon see it incorporating longer-range options, such as a terminal that just plugs straight in to a wireless router (whose heat should really also be captured), or wired mini-boosters.  The principle is simple: concentrate energy use in the plumbed-in components, and minimise it elsewhere.

Just mentioned this on IRC … and it occurs to me that it’s something the chattering classes don’t seem to have noticed. Perhaps if I blog about it, someone might.

Heat exchange is a lot more efficient than generating heat. So we should be using heat exchangers to harness far more of the heat that we generate. Some slight efforts have been made in this direction with combined heat and power, and with harnessing industrial heat for heating living or working space.

On the other hand, all the heat from my computer goes to waste. That on its own is fairly negligible, but in a big data centre that’s a lot of heat. Surely it’s time for server, rack, and other infrastructure-manufacturers to incorporate water-cooling pipes, so that their waste heat can be pumped into an exchange? The industry should adopt a standard size and placement for cooling pipes, so that components can slot together and just work.

With Nature’s heat, it’s the same story. Geothermal heat is popular in some of the most obvious places, like volcanic Iceland where it’s abundant and cheap. But heat exchange works even where there isn’t that extra natural heat: for example, in the UK, it can drastically reduce the energy required to heat a building. Not something you can easily retrofit, but it’s a shame to see it being ignored in new buildings.

One thing I would like to retrofit, if I had a garden, is a heat-exchange with a compost heap. That should be relatively easy, and compost generates lots of heat. Should work well for heating water, or feeding into a heating system.

Sounds like a great class of technology project for sixth-formers or college students with practical abilities. Any students or teachers listening? What are you doing?

This morning we had a sufficiently hard frost for much of town to be dressed in white.

Why am I remarking on such a perfectly normal thing?  Because it’s no longer normal.  We’re a thoroughly maritime climate, meaning we get neither cold winters nor hot summers.  But twenty years ago we’d have had our first such frost sometime in November, and the coldest days would remain below freezing all day.  Indeed, the government in the 1980s introduced a “cold weather” payment to help pensioners, which was triggered when the temperature maximum remained below -2 for several consecutive days (I forget how many).

And now, a first visible frost comes only in February, and is pretty much gone by 11a.m.  No wonder things like English wine are becoming mainstream!

That the UK constitution is horribly broken is no news. The Liar spent his first few years in office playing with it like a twelve-year-old with his toys. His own party (among others) told him it was broken, and Tam Dalyell famously posed the Westlothian Question.

Now it appears to be leading towards a crisis. First, the Brown government makes some serious-sounding announcements about long-overdue improvements to a horribly-broken energy policy. The EU backs it up by imposing legally-binding targets on us.

Then the Scottish parliament refuses both nuclear and wind power developments. While as a matter of geography, Scotland is much better-suited than other UK countries for clean energy generation.

So, what does that mean? The EU’s target for the entire UK falls by default entirely on England? Or England-and-Wales, if the Welsh assembly graciously accepts inclusion.

In a sense, that’s no bad thing: it imposes much tougher targets on England than the EU negotiators intended when they gave the UK such unambitious targets. But as a matter of principle, it’s clearly wrong, and it will certainly fuel justified resentment.

Perhaps that’s the Scottish Parliament’s game plan. Where they’ve been given power without responsibility, they’re going to exercise it to raise resentment, and with it support for proper independence. Once they have independence, it all becomes clear again. In this instance, if the EU had set England and Scotland each its own target instead of a collective UK one, we wouldn’t have this problem.

Sunday Evening. Time to be the barroom bore.

Leading scientists have proposed that we should put giant tubes in the ocean. The idea is that nutrients will rise up the tubes from the ocean depth, giving rise to algal blooms at the surface. The nutrients are moved by wave power, and the algal blooms will grow on solar energy, absorbing substantial amounts of CO₂. If the plan goes ahead and is successful, it will no doubt only be a matter of time before someone proposes a method to harvest the algal bloom for biomass energy.

This plan, like any other, has a downside: algal blooms are hugely damaging to existing marine ecosystems. It could also precipitate large-scale climate events of its own if, for example, ocean currents are affected. But it appears nevertheless likely to be of net benefit on balance, just as, for example, wind, hydro, and nuclear energy are. Since there’s vastly more ocean than land (let alone land under a benign climate), it looks much better than current biomass schemes which involve similar damage to large areas of land. Another factor in its favour is that the existing ecosystem it displaces is not as dense or as productive as areas of rainforest being cleared for biomass.

So here’s another proposal. Let’s requisition some of the Earth’s poorest ecosystems for production of algal bloom and biomass. Specifically, the deserts. Where there’s very high sunlight for energy, and ample minerals to nourish the bloom. All it needs is water.

This is not about irrigating the desert. That’s a tradition that goes right back to the cradle of civilisation, for example along the Nile. Neither is it relevant that many such schemes have proved unsustainable, leaving ghost towns (or cities) where an irrigated area has deteriorated over time. In any case, freshwater sources that could be harnessed for irrigation are already under huge stress.

The only water source sufficient to pour onto the desert on any scale is the sea itself. That’s going to require a lot of energy to move vast quantities of water, maybe with something like an array of giant archimedean screws. My suggestion is that *potentially* we get back a lot more than we put in. That’s on the premise that it enables growth of rich biomass, maybe indeed huge algal blooms (though not of course existing land-based vegetation) if we create saltwater lakes. Thus the Earth’s most barren and unproductive lands become a carbon sink powered by the immensely fierce desert sun, and a biomass source.

This is of course thoroughly experimental, and I’m neither a biologist nor a civil engineer. Assuming the engineers can solve the logistics, the most obvious risk is that the areas used experience such huge buildups of salt that they become like the dead sea (or even like conventional irrigation that turns bad). To avoid that implies ongoing management of the chemical balance of the desert schemes.

Or a biological alternative. Can genetic engineering help evolution on a little by combining fast-growing algae with extremophiles that thrive in a challenging environment?

Here in Europe, we’re a major energy consuming area. We have the research capabilities and the money. And just to the south, we have the world’s biggest desert! The EU, or indeed individual countries within it, should get together with an appropriate North African country and embark on a major research programme. That needs to be managed in a politically sensitive manner, so that it’s clear that the African country (or countries) will (also) see substantial benefits if the experiment is successful.

The government appears to be finally approving a new generation of nuclear power generation, albeit only (at most) to update our existing power stations, within the existing sites. I’m sure that story isn’t over, but at least it seems to have moved on from Blair waffle-but-build-more-pollution hypocrisy. Taken together with plans for serious investment in wind power, it could be the beginnings of political will to start to fix our badly-broken energy policy.

This is beginning to look like a huge “told you so” moment, as topics that got you labelled a nutcase just a few years ago (and in my case for over twenty years) become popular:

• The naive “green” view we need to focus on energy conservation, not [foo] power generation. Wrong: we need to focus on both energy conservation and better generation.
• The naive “green” view we don’t need nuclear, we need renewables. Wrong, we need both nuclear and renewables, at least for the short to medium term.
• The knee-jerk view, nuclear energy is armageddon. Yes, it presents problems, but the reason they seem so big (and even more so why the cost is relatively high) is because we (rightly) insist on solving those problems. Trouble is, burning fossil fuels is massively worse than anything nuclear energy presents, and its problems are quite simply unsolvable.
• The “biofuels can save us” fallacy is finally being exposed as a fraud, as production and use of biofuels has become a reality.

It’s anti-nuclear idiocy that has prevented me joining any of the mainstream “green” organisations all my adult life. I’ll take up the anti-nuclear cause when and only when we’ve stopped all carbon-burning in both power generation and transport, and have viable alternatives. Unfortunately that won’t happen in my lifetime, as it implies a massive population decline, and I can’t expect to survive the kind of catastrophic circumstances that will lead - sometime - to that decline.

Even more unfortunately, we continue to subsidise energy in many ways, thus killing off economic incentives to be more efficient in the marketplace - both R&D in technology, and sustainable lifestyles. That, and overpopulation, are the hardest political nettles to grasp.

OK, I have a dead lightbulb.  I bought a new one, and read on its little box that I should dispose of it carefully.  Not throw it out with my regular household waste.  At the same time, I’ve had to replace the batteries in my radio (for the first time this century, I believe).  Ditto.

Don’t these things come under electronic waste disposal regulations these days, meaning that someone is under an obligation to take them off my hands?  I looked at the council’s website for clues, and found none.  Their feedback form asks for such extensive information I thought it almost easier, and potentially more satisfying, to go round in person and harangue someone.

So I’ve just been.  I put the stuff I need to be rid of in a small carrier bag, and went round to complain of the absence of information, and point out that most such waste is almost certainly going straight into standard household dustbins, and hence landfill.

FWIW, they told me I can take such waste to the Crowndale facility.  I expect for most people, that means a car trip, and hence more pollution than you save by not throwing the stuff in standard domestic waste.  Yeah, right.

I also took the opportunity for a rant about the absurdity of how they recycle glass.  The lady I spoke to took the bait, and started telling me about washing all those difficult jars in hot water and detergent.  Good grief, she’s probably doing more damage washing them up than sending them to landfill!

I don’t expect it’ll do any good (except in that they took the rubbish off me).  But it can’t hurt, either, if someone gives them a hard time about it.