Coal power is making a comeback – an own goal by greens

I tweeted recently that Europe has the stupidest greens in the world.  I meant it. Today I have time to explain.

The Greens of course are political party in many countries now, but the term green applies generally to left wing environmentalists where things only ever seem to benefit the environment if they simultaneous result in wealth redistribution. It is that entire group that I am talking about here. There are lots of environmentalists who aren’t socialist and lots that aren’t idiots, with a very strong overlap in those groups. Many are very smart and support policies or develop solutions that actually benefit or protect the environment. But the greens do seem mostly to fall into the idiot camp. Sorry, but that is a fact of life.

Thanks to green pressure and proselytising of their CO2 catastrophist religion, the EU has gone nuts implementing ludicrously expensive policies to reduce carbon emissions, but has demonstrated mainly negative effects after hundreds of billions investment, often achieving exactly the opposite of what was intended. The greens’ almost universal refusal to engage in proper science or logical reasoning has resulted in very clear demonstration that nature doesn’t care about political ideology or intent, only what is actually done. Some examples are called for:

Many people have been driven needlessly into fuel poverty, their energy bills rising dramatically to pay for wind farms that often actually increase CO2 emissions over their life because they are built on peat-lands. Solar panels on UK rooftops produce more CO2 than they save too, again the opposite of the intent, while managing to successfully divert cash from the poor to the rich, also presumably the opposite of the socialist greens driving it. Industries have been forced to close or relocate overseas due to rising subsidies for renewables, severely damaging the economy and destroying working class jobs, where the intention was to revitalise with a green economy and create jobs, while again pushing up CO2 emissions when the relocation is to countries that produce more CO2 for the same energy. Recession and economic misery has been far deeper and longer with slower recovery thanks to the huge costs resulting directly from green policies, with the poor taking much of the burden. Millions in far away countries have also been pushed into starvation by rising food prices or have been forcefully relocated to make room for palm oil plantations to meet the demand caused by European regulations that biofuels must account for 5% of the fuel in our cars. The peat bogs drained and the rainforests chopped down to make space again increase CO2 emissions.

You couldn’t make it up. The evidence now seems incontrovertible to all but the looniest of greens that CO2 doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as was suggested, and we are certainly not threatened by environmental catastrophe due to global warming. But if we were, all the activities of the European greens so far would have made a huge contribution to making catastrophe worse and much earlier. Green is rapidly becoming synonymous with stupid. Greens are repeatedly shown to be the worst enemy of both the poor and of the environment, both of which they aim to help. Stupid almost isn’t a strong enough word.

Meanwhile, in the USA, where they refused to sign up to the worst of the policies, simple capitalist market forces forced the development of shale gas, reducing energy prices dramatically and stimulating the economy, making people richer and creating jobs, while replacing dirty, CO2-producing coal with clean CO2-light gas. Many business are relocating from the EU to the US, the only successful but entirely unintended CO2 reduction resulting from EU policy so far.  Meanwhile, greens even there have managed to get the government to throw billions away on futile projects to create a mythical green economy, with remarkably few actual jobs to show for the huge investment. It is the diametrically opposite force that has created them in any numbers.

However, because the USA has made so much progress reducing CO2 via shale gas, and is benefiting from greatly reduced energy prices, even it that wasn’t intentional, the price of coal there has been forced down so far that Europe is buying it in. Germany is now reinvesting in coal fired power stations that will greatly increase CO2 emissions, hilarious considering how much cash they have so far wasted on renewables to supposedly reduce them. Meanwhile, although large reserves of shale gas have been found all over Europe, the greens have managed to prevent and delay development of this abundant resource that would revitalise the economy while reducing CO2 emission and reducing pollution. Only now are some mainstream politicians starting to realise the stupidity of such policy and encouraging development of shale gas. In a decade or two the greens might finally understand too.

Japan too is now making a dash for coal. Having closed their nuclear stations, they have to make up the power deficit and with coal being so cheap, is their new fuel of choice. Again, the indirect result of environmental policies have caused a rise in demand for the worst CO2 emitter of them all. But at least the Japanese can also demonstrate that they are exploiting methane clathrates, which would have a CO2-reducing effect while reducing energy costs.

It seems to be Europe where the policies are greenest and stupidest, with the most harm and the highest costs for the least benefit and the consequential wealth redistribution from poor to rich. The only good thing is that since it tuned out that CO2 doesn’t matter as much as they claimed after all, at least they haven’t yet managed to bring about environmental catastrophe. If the greens had been right about CO2, given the policies they’ve so far forced through, we’d really be in a mess.

I rest my case. Europe has the stupidest greens in the world.

Technology Convergence – What’s your Plan? Guest post by Rohit Talwar

Rohit is CEO of Fastfuture and a long-standing friend as well as an excellent futurist. He and I used to do a joint newsletter, and we have started again. Rohit sends it out to his mailing list as a proper newletter and because I don’t use mailing lists, I guest post it here. I’ll post my bit immediately after this one. I’m especially impressed since his bit ticks almost as many filing category boxes as it uses words.

Here is Rohit’s piece:

Technology Convergence – What’s your Plan?

I have just returned from South Korea where I was delivering a keynote speech to a cross-industry forum on how to prepare for and benefit from the opportunities arising from industry convergence. South Korea has made a major strategic commitment starting with government and running through the economy to be a leader in exploiting the potential opportunities arising from the convergence of industries made possible by advances in a range of disciplines. These include information and communications technology, biological and genetic sciences, energy and environmental sciences, cognitive science, materials science and nanotechnology.  From environmental monitoring, smart cars, and intelligent grids through to adaptive bioengineered materials and clothing-embedded wearable sensor device that monitor our health on a continuous basis – the potential is vast.

What struck me about the situation in Korea was how the opportunity is being viewed as a central component of the long-term future of Korea’s economy and how this is manifested in practice. Alongside a national plan, a government sponsored association has been established to drive and facilitate cross-industry collaboration to achieve convergence. In addition to various government-led support initiatives, a range of conferences are being created to help every major sector of the economy understand, explore, act on and realise the potential arising out of convergence.

I am fortunate to get the opportunity to visit 20-25 countries a year across all six continents and get to study and see a lot of what is happening to create tomorrow’s economy. Whilst my perspective is by no means complete, I am not aware of any country where such a systematic and rigorous approach is being taken to driving industry convergence. Those who study Korea know that this approach is nothing new for them – long term research and strategic planning are acknowledged to have played a major role in the evolution of its knowledge economy and rise of Korea and its technology brands on the global stage. Coming from the UK, where it seems that long term thinking and national policy are now long lost relatives, I wonder why it is that so few countries are willing to or capable of taking such a strategic approach.

Rohit on the Road

In the next few months Rohit will delivering speeches in Oslo, Paris, Vilnius, Warsaw, Frankfurt, Helsinki, Denver, Las Vegas, Oman, Leeds and London. Topics to be covered include human enhancement, the future of professional services, the future of HR, transformational forces in business, global drivers of change, how smart businesses create the future, the future technology timeline, the future of travel and tourism, the future of airlines and airports and the future of education. If you would like to arrange a meeting with Rohit in one of these cities or are interested in arranging a presentation or workshop for your organisation, please contact rohit@fastfuture.com

Isn’t graphene fun?

I’ve just been checking up on progress on supercapacitors to see if they are up to the job of replacing car batteries yet. It looks like they will be soon. Supercapacitors have lower energy density than lithium batteries, but can be charged extremely quickly.

My favoured technique is to build mats into the road surface every 50 metres (i.e. same as streetlights), and to charge the supercapacitor bank using induction as the car passes over them. That means that even a small energy capacity would be adequate. It wouldn’t have to power the car for 100 miles or more like a battery, but only for the first and last few kilometres of a journey where there are no mats. Otherwise, range wouldn’t be limited as it would charge all the time on the trip.

However, a few minutes ago I had another little spark of enlightenment. Why not also use the pads for propulsion too, using a linear induction motor?  (I like those)

If the pad gives an impulse to the car as well as a capacitor recharge, then the capacitor won’t need to be as big. And if the impulse is gentle enough, passengers won’t feel a jolt every time they drive over one.

Another little insight, hardly worthy of the name, is that with trains of self driving pods, the pods could be so close together on most journeys that they effectively have a continuous circuit from one end of the train to the other. That means that public transport pods that are only used locally and on certain routes might be able to get by with tiny capacitor banks.

Water companies to deliver Gbit broadband over wet string

Warning: to avoid wasting your time, and since it is no longer April 1st, be aware that this was published as an April Fool joke. Please enjoy it but don’t take it seriously:

Optical fibre is sometimes laid in conventional cable form just like copper wires, but because the actual fibres are so light, they can be coated with a rough surfacing that lets them be blown through plastic ducts using compressed air (the plastic ducts are under 1cm diameter). The fibre wiggles its way to the far end, carried by the air flow. It is simply called ‘blown fibre’ and is used extensively where ducts can easily be laid.

The water industry obviously has huge experience in making smooth channels for water to flow through to every building in the land. Blown fibre technology can adapt to this. Several years ago, advised by future technology consultants Futurizon, research produced a soft furry coating that makes it easy to flush coated fibres down water pipes. The coating is based on sugar and has the consistency of candyfloss. The clever breakthrough was making it so that it lasts until installation is complete and then dissolves harmlessly away in less than an hour.  It is of course safe to drink the tap water even soon after installation.  The remaining problem was how to route the fibres when they come to a junction. The inspiration came from optically guided missiles, which have steerable nose cones, that allow the missile to be routed in the required direction just by rotating the cone. Adding a tiny reusable nose cone capsule to the head to the fibre, and knowing the architecture of the pipework, the fibre can be routed correctly at each junction.

A global consortium of water companies now plans to install nationwide fibre networks via the water supply via a company called Fallopior. The main offices and roll-outs will be in the UK, New Zealand, Australia, and the USA, all of which face issues of getting access to ultrafast broadband for rural areas and all of which have the carbon subsidy economics to make it work. The name of Fallopior presumably emerged because the system uses tubes for delivery and perhaps to try to tap into the female broadband market. At the home, a broadband ‘tap’ is installed that allows the fibre to emerge. Once the fibre is delivered and connected, it is pushed through a silicone plug that is pushed into the tap to completely seal it.

The fibre is routed all the way to the home by this means, and then the broadband tap is opened. A few litres of water later, and the fibre is delivered. It is far more environmentally friendly way of installing the fibre than digging up pavements and roads. The carbon savings and the selling of the associated credits are calculated to reduce the cost of installation to almost zero. This even works in remote areas since the carbon savings are of course far higher here too. The costs of the fibre are low enough to be absorbed into even a low rental agreement. Fallopior say that they can will offer 1Gb/s to any home even in the remotest parts of the country for as little as £5 per month, and this is easily enough to deliver all the high definition TV and internet a home.

Broadband providers have struggled with the economics of fibre to the home and many homes still have to suffer slow broadband, even though they pay far more than this, especially in the country. But all homes have a water supply, so this technology is perfectly adapted. Since the roll-out plans of the other UK providers are so sluggish, the water companies expect to seize massive market share almost overnight.

Some homes questioned about the potential service insisted they don’t want ultra-high speed broadband with the temptations it brings, and amazingly would prefer to have a slower service, even if it means they have to pay more to get less. Engineers have solved this one too. The coating allows very smooth thin nylon string to be coated temporarily and flushed down the pipes in the same way instead of fibre. Since the water keeps it lubricated, wear would be very low and it will only need replaced every 5 years. But that re-installation increases the cost to £7.50 per month.

Now to every nerd’s dream – just like two cans with string between them, this wet string will transmit high audio signals, 100KHz. With the phenomenal ability of today’s coding and compression schemes, this allows 3Mbit/s to be delivered, comparable with what many people receive today on their low speed broadband. Those questioned said they would be happier with this limit which lets them do basic internet access but not much else. It still competes extremely well on price with offerings from other providers so again Fallopior expect massive demand. In an emergency, when there is no electricity supply, a home-owner can still signal the emergency services by making a short series of tugs on the string. Simple Morse code SOS can easily be sent this way. 

A string plant in Cornwall has secretly been built in preparation and has stockpiled  over 100 million km of string. Others have been established on similar basis in the other consortium countries. As another carbon-subsidised activity, the UK site is attached to a 3MW wind turbine. This one looks a little unusual since the spinning motion of the blades is used directly via gears rather like a traditional windmill) to spin the string and power the machinery. String output therefore varies according to wind strength, hence the need to stockpile supplies. Nevertheless, the result is string that is entirely paid for via carbon subsidies. Location in remote Cornwall was chosen because of high winds and proximity to seaside resorts with easy access to local expertise from candyfloss experts. The late arrival of spring and hence the candyfloss market has meant that many were available and willing to assist on the project.

In spite of all the many benefits and promises of very low cost ultra-fast broadband, there is just one problem – as hinted by the unusual just-after-midnight timing of the press release by the Fallopior’s HQ in Auckland, New Zealand, and of course the company’s name.

Hydrogen cars are the wrong solution

http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/ingear/cars/article1209612.ece says that the UK government has produced a report saying that 1.5 million hydrogen cars will be on UK roads by 2030.

Hydrogen cars are part of the future that falls firmly in the category of ‘can do but shouldn’t do’.

I don’t doubt that hydrogen could be manufactured and sold from special filling stations to be used as fuel for fuel cells to make electricity to drive cars, or maybe even used in a modified internal combustion engine, or directly burned to make steam for a steam engine. It can. I don’t even doubt that the government is entirely capable of legislating subsidies for ridiculously expensive and inappropriate solutions just to appease lunatic fringe pressure groups. They are already doing so for wind turbine farms and rooftop solar panels, so why not hydrogen cars. It would just be another shovelful of idiocy on what is already a huge pile. What I do doubt, because I am a futurologist and an engineer, is that it makes any sense.

Hydrogen was once seen in futurist circles as the fuel of the future, for a year or so anyway before anyone did the analysis properly. When they did, they noticed:

Burning hydrogen (even in a fuel cell) produces water as the main product. Water is a greenhouse gas, a much more powerful forcing agent than CO2. It may be condensed by the car, but even then, at least in dry weather,  the water will evaporate from the road surface and enter the water cycle. It acts as a greenhouse gas until it becomes rain again. If it is raining already, the water produced will probably be a harmless addition. Hydrogen cars will therefore have a small but possibly significant effect on the water cycle, weather and climate, just as regular cars do, and probably not that much different. They certainly can’t be assumed to be in any sense environmentally neutral.

Hydrogen needs special containment systems to make it safe, and these are likely to add significantly to the cost of a car.

Fuel cells are still very much more expensive than competing power sources and there is little sign of any imminent major progress.

Making hydrogen generally requires electricity, and it is really just a proxy for the electricity used in its manufacture. It would be just as easy, as cheap, and much safer to just deliver this electricity direct to the cars without going through the hydrogen stage. Electric cars will have batteries and some potential synergy using them as storage for intermittent renewable energy manufacturing such as wind farms. If we are going to have to put up with wind farms anyway, then the economics shift in favour of this approach.

Also, development of new materials and supercapacitors, together with new directed induction technology (that allows large distances between the inductive components), allow for a Scalextric approach to car powering. It is hard to see the point in using an intermediary like hydrogen when this would be a better solution.

I don’t know where the pressure has come for government to think down this path. But it is the wrong path and they should change direction before they waste yet more money on inappropriate, expensive and inefficient infrastructure.

Future population v resources. Humans are not a plague.

Sir David Attenborough is once again in the news, arguing that humans are a plague on the earth. He has been an excellent presenter over the years, but he does himself no favours by making such claims. Doomsayers are invariably wrong. I’ve written a few times about this, but here’s a quick refresher to save you looking them up.

Let’s get rid of a silly straw man before we start – exponential growth continuing forever. Nobody sane think the Earth’s human population will carry on increasing exponentially forever. Obviously it will level off. Exponential growth all the way to infinity isn’t sustainable, but since the population will level off around 10 billion, we really don’t need to spend too much time worrying about the mathematics of infinite consumption. I would personally put the maximum capacity of the Earth at around 100 billion, but I don’t expect us ever to have more than 10 billion here, and nobody sensible does. Other planets will house some more, but they will have their own economics.

First, we aren’t running out of physical resources, just moving them around. Apart from a few spacecraft that have moves some stuff off planet, some excess radioactive decay induced in power stations and weapons, and helium and hydrogen escaping from the atmosphere, all of which is offset by meteorites and dust landing from space, all we have done is convert stuff to other forms. Almost all materials are more plentiful now than they were 40 years ago when Sir David’s predecessors warned of the world running out imminently. They were wrong, so is he. If we do start to run short, we can mine key elements from rubbish tips and use energy to convert back to any form we need. We can engineer substitutes  And we can gather them from space. Another way of looking at this issue is that we live on top of 6000km of resources and only have homes a few metres deep. When we fill them, which doesn’t take much, we dispose of one thing to make room for a new one. Recycling technology is getting better all the time, at the same time as material technology means we need less stuff to make something, and can do so with a wider range of input elements.

We are slowly depleting some organic resources. For example, fossil fuels, but there are several hundred years supply left, and we will not need any more than a tiny fraction of that before we move to other energy sources. Also, fish, many stocks are threatened around the world, so fishing needs some work in designing and implementing better practices, but that is not unachievable by any means. Forestry is being depleted in some areas and expanding in others. Some of the areas that are being wiped out are because environmentalists and other doomsayers have forced daft policies through that perversely encourage people to burn forests down to make the land available for biofuel plantations and carbon offset schemes.

We certainly are not short of space. If the inhabitable land in the world were inhabited at the same density as southern England, we could house 70-80 billion people. The UK sometimes feels full when we get stuck in traffic jams or queues for public services, but these are mainly a matter of design. Self driving vehicles can increase road capacity by a factor of 5, regional rail capacity by a factor of 200. Replacement of most public sector workers by machines, or better still, good system design, would eradicate most queues and improve most services.

Energy isn’t a problem in the long term in spite of what doomsayers claim. Shale gas is already reducing costs in the USA at the same time as reducing carbon dioxide emissions. In Europe, where doomsayers and environmentalist have more power to influence policy, CO2 emissions are increasing while energy costs threaten many areas of the economy. Obama’s recent speech threatens to undermine the USA’s advantage but that’s another story. Nuclear energy currently depends on uranium  but thorium based power is under development and is very likely to succeed in due course, adding several hundred years of supply. Solar, fusion, geothermal and shale gas will add to this to provide abundant power for even a much great population, within a few decades, well ahead of the population curve. The only energy shortages we will see will be doomsayer-induced.

Future generations will face debts handed on to them without their consent, but will also inherit a physical and cultural infrastructure with built in positive feedback that ensure rapid technological development. Among its many benefits, future technology will greatly reduce the amount of material needed to accomplish a task. It will also expand the global economy to provide enough wealth to buy a decent standards of living for everyone. It will also clean up the environment  It will also produce far more food from less land area, allowing land to be returned to nature. Food production per hectare has doubled in the last 30 years. The technology promises further gains  into the foreseeable future.

The world Attenborough is scared of will actually be a greener and more pleasant land, with nature in a better state than today, with a larger world population that is richer and better fed, almost certainly no more than 10 billion. Providing that is, that we can stop doomsayers forcing their policies through – the only thing that would really wreck the environment. A doomsayer-free human population is not a plague but a benefit to the Earth and nature. The doomsayers themselves and their daft policies are the greatest proven threat. If Sir David really cares about nature, he should focus on letting us be inspired by nature as he does so brilliantly, and let technologists get on with making sure it can flourish in the future

 

 

New type of wind harvester

I am moving old blogs across from nvireuk before I close it next month so that I don’t lose them. Here is another. Please don’t take it from this one that I am in favour of wind turbines. I most certainly am not, but if we must use wind power to appease renewable fans, then at least we should do it in ways that are less irritating to humans and wildlife and a little imagination can go a long way with today’s technology compared to the primitive, almost Victorian heavy engineering used for conventional turbines. This method should be a lot quieter, less visually intrusive, about the same efficiency but unlike wind turbines, potentially able to reduce in cost with Moore’s Law. Initial cost would be similar (the costings I mention are based just on their sample prices, which obviously are usually far higher than finished large scale production), so still nowhere near as good as using shale gas, but it could be. Even then, we’d still need backup generation for when the wind isn’t blowing.

Conventional wind energy harvesting uses turbines on a grand scale, connected to a central motor. The whole thing needs heavy engineering, complex control systems and expensive and scarce materials such as neodymium for the motors. It is possible to build a system that is far more elegant, resource-efficient and less intrusive. Perhaps even much cheaper.

Some time ago a Danish company Danfoss, invented plastic capacitors, that generate electrical energy directly when they are bent. Wind pressure could be used to bend small vanes made of this material by pushing it around a spindle. As it rotates, one side goes through extended, the other side is forced to bend on the way back through the gap. By repeated bending and extending every time it rotates, each vane would generate electricity from the wind. These could be arranged in long strings, and many strings made up into a large sail.

The sail would be tethered to an anchor using ropes, and when the wind blows, it would fill up, the vanes would rotate, and energy would be harvested, with no need for a central motor or any heavy engineering. When the wind dies down, the sail would collapse so that it is less visible. Because the vanes individually would be small, just 5-10 centimetres across, no motion would be visible from any distance away, so they would not be as distracting as conventional turbines. Nor would they kill birds. Plastic capacitor sail generators would therefore have a few advantages over conventional approaches.

The disadvantage is that at the moment the material is fairly expensive, but there are excellent prospects for large cost reductions, and these could make it a far cheaper, as well as a greener, way of harvesting wind power.

Future of bicycles

Recycled blog from http://nvireuk.com/

Bicycles occupy the peak of the moral high ground as far as environmentalism is concerned because once they are built and delivered, ongoing emissions come almost entirely from the human riding them. While they are certainly good for the environment overall, the picture isn’t quite as clear as is sometimes portrayed and there are some places where the use of bicycles may not be environmentally sensible.

On proper cycle paths, they are certainly a good solution from both a fitness and environmental point of view (hopefully even once the environmental costs of making the cycle paths and the bicycles are factored in). But when mixed with car traffic, they can be very dangerous, with bicycle riders suffering many times more casualties per mile than car drivers. They also force other vehicles to slow down to pass them, and then to accelerate again. On busy narrow roads, this can often cause significant traffic jams. The bicycle may not be directly the cause of the extra consequent emissions from the cars, but from a system wide view, the overall CO₂ produced would likely have been less had the cyclist driven a car instead, so this must certainly be taken into account when calculating the impact. The carbon costs of the extra accidents, with the resultant traffic jams and so on, should also be factored in. Accidents have a very high carbon cost as well as a human one.

It won’t take long until almost all cars are driven by computer. By the mid 2020s, we will have a lot of automatically driven cars and substitution will accelerate quickly. These cars will be able to travel much closer together, freeing road space both length and width-wise. This means that more car lanes or wider cycle lanes could be provided. With computers driving the cars, far fewer bicycles would be hit, if any. It is therefore likely that bicycles could be much safer to ride in the future, and because they can be more readily separated from car flow, will be more environmentally friendly, although this advantage is greatly diminished for electric cars. Improving the technology for car transport therefore makes cycling even more environmentally friendly too.

A decent cyclist can ride at 7.5m/s on the flat, less uphill and a bit faster downhill. Suppose that on the tough sections, there was a conveyor belt moving at 7.5m’s. This would reduce overall journey time and the problem of arriving very sweaty at the other end. It would also reduce the speed differential between cyclist and passing traffic, making it safer to ride. With a conventional conveyor belt, this looks a ridiculous idea, because the first falling leaf would clog the system up, rain would cause havoc, cars encroaching onto the path would cause mechanical stress because of the speed differential between a conveyor and the road surface, and pedestrians would also try to step onto it and cause yet more havoc. The idea is a non-starter.

Linear induction motors though can propel metal without using moving parts (apart from the metal being propelled of course). Suppose we add a metal plate to the bike, close to the road surface, and put linear induction motors in the cycle lane.  With no moving parts in the conveyor, there would be no problem with clogging, rain, cars or pedestrians.

Many roads have good electrical supplies along them in ducting or even more accessibly in street lighting. If it can be developed cost effectively, this would be a good way of encouraging cycling as a viable transport solution, and reducing carbon production, with beneficial effects on health too.

The cycle lane itself could comprise a heavy duty rubber mat that could be simply rolled out overnight along a roadside and plugged in to the electric supply. This would be easier than having to paint a new path. It can be rolled out piecemeal according to demand. On the bike, there would be a cheap metal plate attached to the front forks so that the bike could be pulled along. It can easily be designed to deflect easily if it hits debris on the surface, so that the cyclist isn’t threatened.

The amount of extra force given to the cyclist could be variable. Bicycles could be given RFID chips to identify them and the personal tastes of that cyclist indulged alongside billing. Some people might want lots of assistance or to go very fast, other want less assistance or to go slower. Since induction plates can be individually controlled, and the bicycle plates can also be tweaked for height or inductance, it is easily customisable in real time.

Mechanical energy is very cheap, whereas the effort required to cycle long distances or up hills is a strong deterrent to many potential cyclists – they are not all super fit! Given the human body’s poor efficiency in converting food into mechanical energy, it is likely to be very competitive in emissions terms even for cycling, let alone compared to using cars.

Wind farm compensation claims undermine their investment potential.

I don’t make many recommendations on investments, but when something comes along that has clear effects, I sometimes do. I am not a financial adviser, and you aren’t paying for my advice, so I make my argument as a futurist and you make your own decision whether to take it on board or not. I take no responsibility for your financial decision, though please feel free to pass on any credit.

I have often advised against anything other than very short term investment in the green industry, and still do. It is volatile at best, with many bankruptcies already, and shows especially poor long term prospects as the poor quality science underpinning it is shown up for what it is – often worthless and counter-productive. This time it is even clearer to me. Avoid investing in wind farms, even more than yesterday.  Here’s why.

Finally there is a proper peer-reviewed scientific study proving what most people suspected already, that wind farms cause health problems and depression in people living near them. Easy-to-read summary of the key bits in the Telegraph: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/energy/windpower/9653429/Wind-farm-noise-does-harm-sleep-and-health-say-scientists.html

The study’s finding were about sleep loss and increased depression, both of which were found to be much greater in communities close to wind turbines. However, these are both known to cause other serious health problems and reduce life expectancy. Suicide links with depression too, so there may also be a measurable impact on suicide rate near wind farms, another study waiting to be done. If as has been proven, wind farms cause loss of sleep and depression, it is therefore reasonable to expect a scientific study to prove a link between wind farms and serious health problems and even early death or suicide.

Separately, the industry has tried to bury and misrepresent the conclusions of a previous proper study that showed their negative effects on house prices. The results however remain valid, there is a proven effect. Erecting a wind farm lowers nearby property values.

Where people have their health or their financial state damaged by a company, and in this case often both, it surely can’t be long before class action suits follow for damages. Once the courts and claim companies get past dealing with the PPI mis-selling compensation claims, there will likely be another swathe based on loss of house value and damage to health attributed to proximity to wind farms.

What is less clear is whether the taxpayer will have to fork out instead. Since the proof of damage is recent, earlier ones could be except from reasonable blame. Since the farms have been commissioned by government, government might be considered to blame and the farm owners and manufacturers only liable for extras caused by specific circumstances or specific designs. Those who recommended, commissioned, housed, built and ran the farms, and who received all the financial benefits even in full knowledge of the harm they were causing, can be expected to deny any wrongdoing and to try to shift blame to avoid  facing the consequences. The taxpayer might well have to pick up much of the bill for damage done in spite of protesting loudly and being ignored all along. However, it will be a brave investor who ignores the risk that justice might actually work against the guilty parties. Justice happens sometimes.

My conclusion is simple: wind farms are now proven to cause damage to property value and health and large compensation claims are likely to follow sometime. Further scientific studies are likely to add weight to the evidence, making compensation payouts highly likely, and there is no provision for this in the tariff guarantees. In the extreme, farms could even be forced to close, eradicating future income (and related production-related tariffs) while leaving the up-front costs and there is no certainty that government will compensate farms for the loss. These prospects therefore obviously damage the value of investments in wind farms.

Population growth is a good thing, updated July 2012

This has been my most popular blog article so far so here is an updated version, since the original is 18 months old now. No big changes, mainly a tidy-up, with a long overdue promised section on biological resources added at the end.

Many people are worried now that we have passed the 7Bn mark for world human population, that we are overpopulating the planet and will reap environmental catastrophe. Some suggest draconian measures to limit or even reduce it. I am not panicking at all, and refuse even to be particularly concerned. I don’t think it is necessarily a bad thing to have a high population. And to use the doom-monger’s favourite term, sustainable, I think it will be entirely sustainable. OK, so, point by point, here is why.

Population is certainly growing rapidly, and will continue till it levels off around 9.5 billion by about 2050. Then it will start to fall. But let’s not treat 9.5Bn as if it is a major catastrophe. Doom-mongers are predicting mass starvation, riots and so on, as doom mongers enjoy doing. But is it so bad? Let’s put it in perspective a bit. I live in the South of England. When I go on walks with my wife I will typically meet only a few people on the way; mostly it will be empty countryside and most of the time we won’t be able to see a single building or road. I do not feel it is terribly overpopulated here yet, even with the second highest population density on Earth, at 470 people per square kilometre. India only has 345, even with its massive population. China has even less at only 140, while Indonesia has 117,  Brazil just 22, and Russia a mere 7.4 people per square kilometre. Yet these are the world’s biggest populations today. Room for expansion perhaps. If all the inhabitable land in the world were to be occupied at average English density, the world can actually hold 75Bn people. There would still be loads of open countryside, still only 1 or 2% covered in concrete and tarmac. So let’s stop first of all from imagining that we are running out of space any time soon. We just aren’t!  We panic in the UK because we see the uncomfortable end of extreme inequality in global distribution of people, but that will self limit. If it becomes too dense, people will stop immigrating.

Secondly, westerners’ (i.e. relatively wealthy people’s) houses have typically 5 or 6m deep of living space. They live on top of 6000km deep of materials. So do their neighbours. Not all of it is useful, but it is really hard to see why there is so much panic about physical resources when they lie so deep under our feet. When we discard them, they are still there, just repositioned. If you buy stuff, your house quickly fills up and you have to throw something out to make space before you buy more. It gets recycled or thrown on landfill, which could become a  future mine if materials ever did become scarce enough. A few spacecraft have left the earth forever over the years, taking a few tons of material away, but space dust occasionally lands too, so actually there are more physical resources on Earth than there were before people came into being. Organic resources such as forests and fisheries are a different matter. I’ll look at them later in this article. It won’t change the balance of the argument because we will learn to manage them better.

But of course, if everyone wants to live to westerns standards, the demands on the environment will grow as the poor become richer and able to afford more. If we try to carry on with existing technology, or worse, with yesterday’s, we will not find it easy. Those who consider technology and economic growth to be enemies of the environment, and who therefore would lock us into today’s or yesterday’s technology, would condemn not only billions of people to poverty and misery but also force those extra people to destroy the environment to try to survive. The result would be miserable future for humanity and a wrecked environment. Ironically, they have the audacity to call themselves environmentalists or greens, but they are the true enemies of the earth, and of humanity. If we ignore such lunacy as we should, and allow progress to continue, we will see steady global economic growth that will result in a higher average income per capita in 2050 with 9.5Bn people than we have today with only 7Bn. The technology meanwhile will develop so much that the same standard of living can be achieved with far less environmental impact. For example, bridges hundreds of years ago used far more material than today’s , because they were stuck with primitive science and technology. Technology is better now and needs less material, and is better for the environment. With nanotechnology and improved materials, we will need even less material to build future bridges. The environmental footprint of each person will certainly be far lower in 2050 if we accept new technology than it will be if we restrict growth and technology development. It will almost certainly be less even than today’s, even though our future lifestyles would be far better. Trying to go back to yesterday’s technologies without greatly reducing population and lifestyle would impose such high environmental impact that the environment would be devastated. We don’t need to, and we shouldn’t.

Take TVs as another example. TVs used to be hugely heavy and bulky glass monsters that took up half the living room, used lots of electricity, but offered relatively small displays with a choice from just a few channels. Today, thin LCD/LED displays use far less material, consume far less power, take up far less space and offer far bigger and better displays offering access to thousands of channels via satellites and web links. So as far as TV-based entertainment goes, we have a higher standard of living with lower environmental impact. The same is true for our phones, computers, networks, cars, fridges, washing machines, and most other tools. Better materials enable lower use. New science and technology has enabled new kinds of materials that can substitute for scarce physical resources. Copper was once in danger of running out imminently. Now you can build a national fibre telecommunication network with a few bucketfuls of sand and some plastic. We have plastic pipes and water tanks too, so we dont really need copper for plumbing either. Aluminium makes reasonable cables, and future materials will make even better cables, still with no copper use. There are few things that can’t be done with alternative materials, especially as quantum materials can be designed to echo the behaviour of many chemicals. It is highly unlikely that we will ever run out of any element. We will simply find alternative solutions as shortages demand.

Oil will be much the same story. To believe the doom-mongers, our use of oil will continue to grow exponentially until one day there is none left and then we will all be in big trouble, or dead, breathing in 20% CO2 by then of course. Again, nonsense. By 2030, oil will be considered a messy and expensive way of getting energy, and most will be left in the ground. The 6Gjoules of energy a barrel of oil contains could be made for $30 using solar panels in the deserts, and electricity is clean. Cheap electricity won’t come from our UK rooftops as current incentivised by our green-pressured government, but somewhere it is actually sunny, deserts for example, where land is cheap, because it isn’t much use for anything else. The energy will get to us via superconducting cables. Sure, the technology doesn’t yet exist, but it will. Oil will only cost $30 a barrel because no-one will want to pay more than that for what will be seen as an inferior means of energy production. Shale gas might still be used because it produces relatively little CO2 and will be very cheap, but even that will start declining as the costs of solar and nuclear variants fall.

By the time we get to our 2050 world with 9.5Bn people, fusion power will be up and running, alongside efficient solar (perhaps some wind) and other forms of energy production, proving an energy glut that will help with water supply and food production as well as our other energy needs. In fact, thanks to the development of graphene desalination technology, clean water will be abundantly available at low cost (not much more than typical tap-water costs today) everywhere. Our technologies will be so advanced by then that we will be able to control climate better too. We will have environmental models based on science, not eviro-religion. So we will know what we’re doing rather than acting on guesswork and old-wives’ tales. We will have excellent understanding of genetics and biotech and be able to make superior crops and animals, so will be able to make enough food to feed everyone, ensuring not only quantity but nutritional quality too. While today’s crops deliver about 2% of the solar energy landing on their fields to us as food, we will be able to make foods in factories more efficiently, and will have crops that are also more efficient. It is true that we may see occasional short-term food shortages, but in the long term, there is absolutely no need to worry about feeding everyone. And no need to worry about the impact on the environment either, because we will be able to make more food with far less space. No-one needs to be hungry, even if we have 9.5Bn of us, and with steady economic growth, everyone will be able to afford food too. This is no fanciful techno-utopia. It is entirely deliverable and even expectable. All around the world today, people’s ethical awareness is increasing and we are finally starting to address problems of food and emergency aid distribution, even in failing regimes. The next few decades will not eradicate poverty completely, but it will make starvation much less of a problem, along with clean water availability.

How can we be sure it will be developed? Well, there will be more people for one thing. That means more brains. Those people will be richer, they will be better educated, many will be scientists and engineers. And many will have been born in countries that value engineers and scientists greatly, and will have a lot of backing, so will get results. And some will be in IT, and will develop computer intelligence to add to the human effort, and provide better, cheaper and faster tools for scientists and engineers in every field to use. So, total intellectual resources will be far greater than they are today. Therefore we can be certain that technological progress will continue to accelerate. As it does, the environment will become cleaner and healthier, because we will be able to make it so. We will restore nature. Rivers today in the UK are cleaner than 100 years ago. The air is cleaner too. We look after nature better, because that’s what people do when they are affluent and well educated. In 50 years time we will see that more widespread. The rainforests will be flourishing, some species will be being resurrected from extinction via DNA banks. People will be well fed. Water supply will be adequate. But all this can only happen if we stop following the advice of doom-mongers and technophobes who want to take us backwards.

That really is the key: more people means more brain power, more solutions, better technology. For the last million years, that has meant steady improvement of our lot. In the un-technological world of the cavemen hunter-gatherers, the world was capable of supporting around 60 million people. If we try to restrict technology development now, it will be a death sentence. People and the environment would both suffer. No-one wins if we stop progress. That is the fallacy of environmental dogma that is shouted loudly by the doom mongers. Some extremists in the green movement would have us go back to yesterday, rejecting technology, living on nature and punishing everyone who disagrees with them. They can indulge such silliness when they are only a few and the rest of us support them, but everyone simply can’t live like that. Without technology, the world can only support 60 million. Not 7 billion or 9.5 billion or 75 billion. There simply aren’t enough nice fields and forest for us all to live that way.

It is a simple choice. We could have 60 million thoroughly miserable post-environmentalists living in a post eco-catastrophe world where nature has been devastated by the results of stupid policies invented by so-called environmentalists, and trying to make a feeble recovery. Or we can ignore their nonsense, get on with our ongoing development, and live in a richer, nicer world where 9.5Bn people (or even far more if we want) can be happy, well fed, well educated, with a good standard of living, and living side by side with a flourishing environment, where our main impacts on the environment are positive. Technology won’t solve every problem, and will even create some, but without a shadow of a doubt, technology is by far nature’s best friend. And ours. Not the ‘environmentalists’, many of whom are actually among the environment’s worst enemies – at best, well-meaning fools.

And there is one final point hat is always overlooked in this debate. Every new person that is born is another life, living, breathing, loving, hopefully having fun, enjoying life and being happy. Life is a good thing, to be celebrated, not extinguished or prevented from coming into existence just because someone else has no imagination. Thanks to the positive feedbacks in the development loops, 50% more people means probably 100% more total joy and happiness. Population growth is good, we just have to be more creative, but that’s what we do all the time. Now let’s get on with making it work.

Good times lie ahead. We do need to fix some things though.

I mentioned that physical resources won’t diminish significantly in quantity in terms of the elements they hold at least, though those we use for energy (oil, coal and gas) give up their energy when we use them and that is gone. However, the ecosystem is a different matter. Even with advanced genetic technology we can expect in the far future, it will be difficult to resurrect organisms that have become extinct, and far better to make sure they don’t. Even though an organism may be brought back, we’d also have to bring back the environment it needs with all the intricately woven inter-species dependencies. Losing a single organism might be relatively recoverable, but losing a rain forest will be very hard to fix. Forests are very complex systems. In fact designing and making a synthetic and simpler rainforest is probably easier than trying to regenerate a lost natural one. We really don’t want to have to do that. It would be far better to make sure we preserve the existing forests and other complex ecosystems. Poor countries may reasonably ask for some payment to preserve theirs rather than chopping them down to sell wood. We should also make sure to remove current incentives to chop them down to make room for palm oil plantations to satisfy the demands of poorly thought out environmental policies in rich countries.

The same goes for ocean ecosystems. We are badly mismanaging many fisheries today, and that needs to be fixed. There are certainly some signs of progress.  Silly EU regulations that cause huge quantities of fish to be caught and thrown back dead into the sea will soon be history. Again, these are a hangover from previous environmental policy designed to preserve fish stocks, but again this was poorly thought out and has had the opposite result. Other policies in the EU and in other parts of the world are also causing problems by unbalancing populations and harming or distorting food chains. The bans on seal hunting are good – we love seals, but the explosion is seal populations caused by throwing dead fish back has increased the demand of the seal population to over 100,000 tons of fish a year, when it is already severely stressed by over-fishing. The dead fish have also helped cause an explosion in lobster populations and in some sea birds. We may appreciate the good side, but we mustn’t forget to look for harmful effects that may also be caused. It is obvious that we could do far better job, and we must. A well-managed ocean with properly designed farms should be able to provide all the fish and other seafood we need, but we are well away from it yet and we do need to fix it.

With ongoing scientific study, understanding or relationships between species and especially in food chains is improving, and regulations are slowly becoming more sensible, so there is hope. Many people are switching their diets to fish with sustainable populations. But these will need managed well too. Farming is suitable for many species and crashes in some fish populations have added up to a loud wake-up call to fix regulations around the world. We may use genetic modification to increase growth and reproduction rates, or otherwise optimise sustainability and ocean capacity. I don’t think there is any room for complacency, but I am confident that we can and will develop good husbandry practices and that our oceans and fish stocks will recover and become sustainable.

Certainly, we have a greater emotional attachment to the organic world than to mere minerals, and we are part of nature too, but we can and will be sustainable in both camps, even with a greatly increased population.