About Environment - One Liners Again

In my post Environment 1 I banged on about clueless one liners dished up, typically, in pub conversations. Sadly, there are people who go a stage further than this, by dressing up their clueless one liners with pictures and getting them into print.

I came upon an example of this in, of all places, PrivateEye, a periodical I love and respect. It shows, as far as I remember, people in an electric car congratulating themselves on their non-polluting worthiness. In the background we can see the putheringly polluting power station which is providing the car with its so-called green fuel.

I made a mental note to write this up as yet another example of the ignorant publicising their ignorance in the mistaken impression that the rest of us are the dim ones. However, in my own dim way, I forgot to save the mag and it went out with the recycling. So, I did a bit of Googling to see if I could pick it up online. I didn't find that specific cartoon, but I did discover that it is just one example of a lazy cartoon trope: there are loads of them all making that same wrong point.

So let's nail it:

• Even if a car runs on electricity from coal fired power stations, it still has a smaller carbon footprint than petrol or diesel.
• While electric cars create more emissions during their manufacture than do conventional cars, this is soon paid back because of their very low output after that.
• An electric car's emissions will improve as time goes by because of the increasing use of non-fossil generation by power stations. A conventional car cannot get better and may get worse as it ages.

Then there are additional but less quantifiable benefits:

• A good deal of battery charging takes place overnight for obvious reasons. There is often a surplus of grid energy at that time so charging doesn't add anything to already existing emissions.
• In America, many electric car owners use solar panels to help with charging. While not providing the total energy needed, they do reduce the demand these cars makes on the grid. We can expect that practice to spread as panels get cheaper and better. (The 100W panel on my boat cost only £100. My 56W panel cost 3 times that much 10 years ago.)
• As with all early stage technology, cars and batteries are set to improve over time.

These points are taken from here:

http://planetsave.com/2014/09/18/electric-cars-greener-average-car-100-usa/

The article dates back to 2014 so it's getting on a bit. It uses research quoted by the Union of Concerned Scientists so it's a good idea to follow the link to their website and search around for more up to date stats. 

Here is a more up to date article (2017) which gives clear comparisons between the various sorts of car - plug in, hybrid, diesel etc.

https://www.theguardian.com/football/ng-interactive/2017/dec/25/how-green-are-electric-cars

These articles are clear about the sources of their stats, and are careful and moderate in their commentary. There's lots of stuff about the subject on the net. But please don't buy the kind of ignorant smartarsery that prompted me to write this post in the first place.

About Politics - A Hard Centre Please!

As I write, 8 Labour and 3 Conservative MP's have broken away from their parties to form an independent group in the hope of creating a rational alternative to the negativity, irrationality and incompetence of their parties.

I wish them success and I hope they will be a rallying point for thinking voters.

Hard Centre

The group is likely to be categorised as centrist. This category comes with some dodgy history, so:

If a centre party or tendency does emerge, it needs to distance itself from any easy 'Liberal Consensus'; it should not squirm to be nice to everyone. It should be a hard centre: after all, rationality is the toughest of regimes with no comfort blankets of blind faith or tribalism. It should be prepared to stand up to the thuggish right and the zealot left, with straight talk backed by its clearly expressed principles and an evidence led programme.

If there is any support for Remain it should be clear this is not the same as a vote of confidence in the EU as it is. It should look the EU unapologetically in the eye, telling it that it bears as much responsibility for the current situation as does British politics; that similar situations are brewing elsewhere in Europe; that reform is needed (choose your issue - fishery, agriculture, the indigenous working class?). It needs to lead on an approach to borders which accepts that the outer borders are a joint manpower and financial responsibility. Britain, if we remain in the EU, should be a powerful and positive policy-leading player, not a mardy sideline whinger as in the past.

A rational approach to immigration needs to be put forward which is economically practical, is humane and international but which recognises local sensitivities and does not require working class localities to bear the largest share of pressure unsupported. (1)

It should be a principle that communities are not punished for progress. When we decide to move away from an industry, for reasons of environment or modernisation, it is not fair that communities dependent on it should be left destitute. (2) And the remedy for this does not consist of a belated bung of a bit of one-off cash such as has recently been suggested.

I want to see an end to tribal chanting and ingratiation. Whether it be Brown's 'Bigotgate' chant to the zealot left, Livingstone's Hitler crack, or McDonnell's Churchill gaffe. (Why didn't he say 'That's a stupid question, fck off'?) This sort of thing gives traction to facile stupidity and will lead us by a process of folie a deux to the Planet Stupid.

***

1. Labour must share the blame for bringing about the current upsurge of racism:
   '...the conflation of race, equality issues and immigration hampered a proper discussion and internal debate to prepare for government and some of the challenges we saw. [There was] no real strategic understanding or foresight of what was to come.'
   (Ed Owen, advisor to Home Secretary, 1997 (BBC Radio 4, The Briefing Room, 30/06/2016: Immigration, Why Did It Rise?))
   So the immigration debate was handed to the loony right on a plate.                                      
2. If you are living in a US mining town and your mortgage will not be paid if nobody wants your coal any more, you are going to be punished for progress. Decarbonisation will take your life away. Your town is a work camp based on one industry. You will pick up the tab for progress. And no-one will help you. Except Trump.

***

You can find the Independent Group of MP's here:

https://www.theindependent.group/statement

Check out my other posts for more on this,

and for some background:

 https://whysgetsserious.blogspot.com/2016/02/about-assholes.html

About Brexit - A Voter's Dilemma 2

A couple of months ago I wrote to my MP expressing some of the concerns outlined in my post,  About Brexit - A Voter's Dilemma.

Here is an extract:

'I want to be spoken to by politicians who respect me to the extent of thinking I might understand rational argument.

I don't want to be subjected to snake oil salesmanship designed to win me over by trickery rather than by convincing me by rationality and evidence.

My aversion to snake oil, and my wish to be spoken to by people who respect my ability to understand rational argument, are especially relevant to Brexit. Even my conservative thinking, Brexit voting, working class drinking mates in the [pub] are no longer so sure of themselves: 'We weren't given enough information', and 'All we got was remoaners versus £Zillion NHS promises on buses' are verbatim quotes from two of them.

I don't want an electoral choice which asks me to choose between racists – islamaphobe or antisemite.

There's a whole bunch of us out here who understand the simple logic of the idea that we can condemn some of Israel's behaviour without having to rewrite history and become holocaust deniers and anti-semites.

At the same time I do not want a party who are cowed by zealots who scream racist every time someone raises a concern about immigration.

(Gordon Brown – 'Bigotgate'?)

I don't want the condescension which leads posh politicians to make clumsy attempts to drink beer or eat pies (past Labour leaders), or to make feeble Bernard Manning type jokes (BoJo) - in a cringe-making effort to get down with the man in the pub.

And speaking of this demographic, I want a party that recognises that the working class are no longer wearing clogs and flat caps and working in mills, and that they are mostly not employed in strategically powerful union-represented industries. And that, unlike other deserving groups in society, who are recognised and represented, they get very little recognition except, perhaps, in the form of blame.

I am fed up with issues being presented as two part oppositions – Doom versus Paradise.

There may have been validity in this when the Left had a huge homogeneous core of big industry clock punchers all in search of a better sort of state. But now it is insulting. We are more or less 50:50 for and against Brexit for instance. So is half the populace stupid? If we leave the EU or not, a large number of people will be very unhappy – and their concerns should be treated with respect and not with derision.

Another destructive consequence of such false opposition is that it creates an illusion that Goodies are totally good and Baddies are totally bad. In the case of the EU I fear that a second referendum, if it were to happen and if it came out in favour of Remain, would be taken as a seal of approval for the EU as it is. But I think there is much wrong with it. It's just that I think recent events are a wake-up call and we should be working to change it from within. Similarly, I think there's a lot wrong with the NHS - but I certainly don't want to lose it and would be happy to pay more in tax for it. So as well as supporting it I want it to be looked at critically.

In short, I want grown-up political parties that treat me as a grown-up, tell me what they want to achieve and why, and which do a bit of fact-checking before offering what they want me to think is evidence. Parties that are not spooked by tunnel visioned zealots or that mistake the one liners of Twitter for anything other than the modern version of poison pen letters.

As someone who works with people from many countries I desperately want the bunch of gurning caricatures currently humiliating my country in the eyes of the world to be replaced by grownups.'

I hope to expand on some of these points in further posts.