I’m feeling a little stronger now. I was stunned into a strange state of despondency after England’s pathetic exit from the World Cup, so it took me a little while to perk up and notice that there were other sporting events taking place. I’d completely missed the entire first week of Wimbledon… no great loss you might say, and frankly with each year that passes I feel more like agreeing with you.

Wimbledon… the home of lawn tennis, the great annual jamboree of grass, gut, logo-riddled sportswear and strawberries ‘n’ cream. A fortnight of sweat, swearing, grunting, bad manners and testosterone-fuelled fist-pumping. And that’s just the women. And Andrew Murray’s mother.

Andrew Murray… now that Wayne ‘Mr Potato Head’ Rooney and his chav mates have embarrassed themselves into oblivion, the mantle of ‘Great British Sporting Hero’ has been wrapped once again round the shoulders of the slack-jawed, charmless Caledonian. As I write, he is playing (and presumably losing to) Rafa Nadal. I won’t be watching. If I have to watch opposing foreigners batter each other into submission for some tacky, meaningless trophy, I’d rather watch Holland v Brazil or Germany v Argentina.

Oh, and I really hope Nadal wins. I have spent too long listening to our Scottish neighbours proudly declaiming that they would support anybody as long as they were playing England. Well, that cuts both ways, Jimmy.

There might be some cricket happening somewhere, I’m sure the Australians are over here at some point this summer. Perhaps I can sit in the garden and listen to it on the wireless…

Not really anything to do with England failing to beat the USA, although it didn’t help. Not the quality of the football either, although some of the opening games have been predictably drab and cagey affairs. No, my beef is with the TV coverage, which is reaching the point where I can hardly bear to turn on the set. I have missed 3 matches already, which is unheard of.
Whoever is in charge of the live TV feed from South Africa is obsessed with using fancy replay technology, even while the ball is in play, so we have to wait patiently and guess what is happening on the pitch. I’ve lost count of the number of times we have been treated to footage of crowd and/or players looking anguished or joyful, managers throwing tantrums, ‘famous’ faces in the stands looking bored, injured players rolling around in agony, repeated replays from every possible angle of a goal or a foul we have seen umpteen times already, all shown in super slow motion that makes you wonder if the producers have seen ‘The Matrix’ once too often. In one match we even lost 15 seconds of live action while we were fed close-up images of the corner of the net bulging and billowing, as the game continued unremarked by cameras or commentators.
This obsession with getting the most from undoubtedly impressive video technology has been increasing for years. Up till now I could tolerate it, because the unnecessary bits were shorter, and with a little practice you could kind of judge there wasn’t a lot happening on the pitch by the noise level of the crowd. Which brings me to my second beef. Who on earth thought it was a good idea to encourage every spectator to have one of those damn plastic trumpets to blow? The soundtrack of every match has been a constant cacophony of monophonic honking, like a swarm of bees buzzing in my head, and it completely drowns the usual crowd noises, old-fashioned stuff like cheering, booing or whistling. No scope here for a much-loved aspect of our game, traditional football chants and songs. No choruses of “You’ll Never Walk Again” or “The Referee’s A Wanker”. All drowned out by the droning blare of what was obviously a marketing man’s dream, and has become a viewer’s (and commentator’s) nightmare.
I wonder how it affects the viewing figures. How many others decided they would give Algeria v Slovenia a miss so their ears could take a break, as I did. I wonder what the advertisers and sponsors will think.

Well, it didn’t happen after all. We finished up with a coalition government of Conservatives and Liberal Democrats. Quite an event for us Brits, accustomed as we are to rigid political boundaries and the centuries-old Parliamentary trench warfare of government v opposition, us v them, yah-boo-sucks Punch and Judy politics that passes for debate here. The idea of a coalition, of people from different parts of the political spectrum actually settling down to make things work in a practical, commonsense way is somehow not British. It’s the sort of thing they do in Italy, for God’s sake, or one of those tiny Central European states where vampires have tax havens. At least, as far as the United Kindom Parliament at Westminster goes, an institution that is both stabilised and hampered by the weight of its traditions. Of course, the upstart Assemblies in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland know all about coalitions, and actually make them work rather well. But that is a topic for another day.

In a previous post, I wrote about how the fuss over the hung Parliament had obscured the great achievement of the Green Party of England and Wales in returning their first MP to Westminster.  Caroline Lucas’s  novelty value has attracted a fair amount of media attention, it will be interesting to see what happens to her profile once some of the shine has come off. However, right now her stock is high and media opportunities are plentiful. One of the latest is the publishing by Channel 4 News of an alternative Queen’s Speech, written by Dr Lucas. For those unfamiliar with these things, the Queen’s Speech is the centrepiece ritual of the State Opening of Parliament. A short summary of the (new or continuing) government’s policy intentions is prepared for Her Majesty to read in front of the assembled members of both Houses. It’s a farce really, Monarch As Mouthpiece, an excuse for paid representatives of the people to stop doing anything useful and instead take walk-on parts in a meaningless pageant. The whole jamboree seems to drag on for ever, the speech itself  lasts  two or three minutes. Have they not heard of email?

Caroline Lucas’s alternative Queen’s Speech adopts the traditional style and tone to which we have become accustomed, a string of  one liners of the “My government will” or “My government intends to” variety. It is customary for there to be few real specifics such as how, or when, these things will, or may, happen, and the language is carefully angled so that hardly anything is a genuine commitment. It would have been refreshing for this Green document to cast aside those conventions, as the new Coalition’s offering tried to do, but that’s a minor quibble. The content is much more important.

Some of what Her Majesty recited for us was fairly predictable, kicking off with the three main strands of the Green Party manifesto: low-carbon economy, promoting a fairer society, and tackling the economic crisis. Some items that you might have expected to get a mention don’t make it. We get a promise to “decommission Britain’s nuclear weapons”, but nothing about phasing out nuclear power stations and resolutely opposing new ones, as stated on page 35 of the 2010 Green Party manifesto. I guess that this, like a number of other manifesto commitments, had to make do with being subsumed under a general bullet point, in the interests of making the whole thing fit the sound-bite format. A shame that, while some really good points didn’t make it to the final cut, some totally dotty ones did.

Try this: “The redistributive tax measures will ensure that a non-means-tested citizen’s pension may be introduced at the level of £170 for individual pensioners and £300 for couples”. Setting aside the studied ambivalence of the words I have highlighted, do the Greens really want to give every eligible adult a hugely inflated pension without even checking that they need it or not? It’s absolutely right to ensure that people who are in genuine need do not go without, but, as with the current situation with winter fuel payments, well-off people will just take the extra cash and stick it in a tax-free savings account or a trust fund for their grandchildren. It does not address a need, it just diverts money away from those who are genuinely struggling.

Or this: “… a requirement for all companies to have at least 40 per cent of their boards of directors made up of women”. I have never been a fan of positive discrimination. Surely, if we are serious about “making Britain a fairer and more inclusive society”, the best person for the job should get it, regardless of gender, race, age, etc etc. I fail to see how this kind of measure does anything to advance women’s, or indeed anyone’s, interests.

Please don’t misunderstand me. I may sound critical, but there’s a lot to read in the Greens’ manifesto and surely no one individual agrees with 100% of it. Settling on your political allegiance is a balancing act, weighing the parties’ positions on each issue and coming up with a ‘best’, or ‘least worst’, fit. Until we have a system which allows every citizen to vote on every issue, there will always be voters who strongly disagree with some of their chosen party’s policies. In fact, it baffles me how any government can claim a popular mandate to do anything. Still, we must do our best with what we have. I surprised myself recently by becoming a member of a political party for the first time in my life, and yes, I joined the Green Party, in spite of my misgivings about some of their policies, and about the way that their core environmental messages are being diluted and buried by the ‘other stuff’. Maybe I can work to change that from within. Certainly, it’s better for me to be inside the tent pissing out than outside pissing in.

So here we are, five days on from the General Election and we still don’t have a result. Having spent days cosying up to the Conservatives. the Liberal Democrats are now negotiating with Labour, although it’s being said that these new talks are not going as well as we might have expected given the vast acreage of common ground between the two parties.

The rolling news channels’ coverage of  events is becoming a tad desperate now. I use the word ‘events’  loosely because for some time now, despite the anchor persons’ claims that the whole thing is fantastically exciting and fast moving, damn all has been happening. When you see the scrolling banner at the foot of the screen proclaim “BREAKING NEWS: Gordon Brown’s car leaves Downing Street” you sense they are clutching at straws. The media feels obliged to cover this, and of course it is important. However, actual news is so thin on the ground that they are compelled to fill the void by interviewing an ever more surreal collection of British political faces, some of whom I was convinced had died years ago. And, of course, none of these interviewees actually KNOWS anything.

Since the world and his wife are now apparently qualified to express an opinion on what’s happening (allegedly), this reporter doesn’t want to be left out. I was appalled when I heard that the Lib Dems had started negotiating with the Conservatives, and frankly amazed, given the huge differences between them in terms of policy and values. I was delighted when it was announced that talks with Labour had started, but my enthusiasm for a ‘progressive alliance’ was tempered by a number of factors, most of them practical issues such as the House of Commons numbers game, public perception of a Lab-Lib coalition as a tacky stitch-up to keep Labour in power, and the complexity of managing a loose collection of parliamentary groupings. It wouldn’t be just Lab-Lib, but potentially all the other minorities such as Plaid Cymru, SNP, even the Greens. Sorry, Green.

Talking of which… Caroline Lucas was interviewed this morning, and was quizzed about how she would align herself with whatever lashed-up government emerges from the mess. She was politely but firmly consistent in saying that her voting would be determined on “a case by case basis”. No dogmatic party line to follow, no Whips to be obeyed on pain of political death, just pragmatic, common-sense consideration of the issues. If only everyone in Parliament could behave like that.

One final thought… given the tight numbers involved if the so-called Rainbow Coalition actually happened, we might even see a situation where our solitary Green MP held the balance of power in a crucial vote. How cool would that be?

All this chatter about the first hung Parliament for 36 years, and what is to  be done about it, has completely overshadowed a great event. The Green Party now has its first MP, after Caroline Lucas beat Labour into second place in the Brighton Pavilion constituency with a swing of 8.4%.

Hearty congratulations to Dr Lucas on her tremendous achievement.

I’m just about old enough to remember the last U.K. General Election to result in a hung parliament. I was certainly of an age to vote in 1974, but sadly my memory is  now too unreliable for me to remember if I actually did. Probably not, as I was still fanning the dying embers of student radicalism in those days, and I would very likely have rejected the whole democratic process as corrupt and generally irrelevant.

No change there then. Here in the People’s Republic of Suburbia, whoever I vote for a Tory wins by a country mile and five furlongs. My deepest regret is that the Official Monster Raving Loony Party has never fielded a candidate in my constituency, so that I could maximise the futility of exercising my precious vote. I didn’t even have a realistic chance of achieving anything through tactical voting, as the traditional Conservative majority is so vast that they could run a medium-sized avocado as a candidate and still win. Playing my usual game of  “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe”,  I stuck a cross in the Liberal Democrat box.

Little did I realise how close my vote would actually get to some tiny degree of relevance. Less than two days after I finally made it into the polling station to vote, the Liberal Democrats are locked in deep discussions over their role in engineering a viable government for the U.K.  Our media channels are glowing white hot with expert opinion, speculation and analysis over how the Lib Dems will use their 55 Parliamentary seats to bolster the two failing main parties, and what inducements they will accept as the price of their co-operation. Reminiscent of 1974, when Edward Heath failed to negotiate a deal with the Liberals and was forced to resign, leaving the door open for a Labour government.

I am an habitual Labour voter, so I naturally lean towards maintaining Labour in power by any means. My perception of the Lib Dems has always been that they are more natural bed-fellows of Labour than the Conservatives, although more cerebral, idealistic and principled than either. Those principles led Nick Clegg to announce on Friday that the Tories, as the party gaining the most seats and the highest proportion of the national vote, had the right to have the first chance to demonstrate that they can form a government in the national interest. Hence the first collaboration offer came from Conservative leader David Cameron. Details are sketchy right now, but it seems pretty certain that posts in a future Conservative Cabinet will be offered to Lib Dems, and some kind of accomodation may be arrived at over the issue of electoral reform, although probably falling short of instant legislation on full-blown proportional representation (PR).

It’s interesting how the PR issue has been seized upon as the principal motivation for the Lib Dems to work with one or other of the main parties. A relatively small number of activists aside, not even the Liberal Democrat rank and file are particularly bothered by PR, and it was never a major issue during the election campaign. And of course neither Tories nor Labour want it because it would undermine their positions as the ‘Big Two’ parliamentary parties. While I appreciate the energy being spent on a possible resolution to my perpetual “whoever I vote for the Conservative gets in” conundrum, there are many other policy differences between the parties that are much more important and far-reaching. The Lib Dems want to scrap the Trident nuclear deterrent, for example, while the Big Two want to keep it. The Lib Dems are opposed to expanding nuclear power at the expense of investment in renewables. The list of deep differences goes on. How will this cocktail of conflicts affect the future stability and longevity of whatever pseudo-coalition is arrived at?

In another parallel with 1974, we are embroiled in a deepening economic and financial crisis. In these troubled times, the priority must to establish a workable government that will last. A quickie marriage of convenience that can be rushed out on Monday morning just in time to keep the markets off our backs is not enough.

I’m grateful to Jim Rawles at Survivalblog.com for a link to a recent study which proposes an innovative approach to the calculation and allocation of required emissions reductions. The study, ‘Sharing global CO2 emission reductions among one billion high emitters’ was published on July 6th in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A PDF version can be found here. The authors, hailing from Princeton Environmental Institute, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, Energy Research Centre of the Netherlands, and Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei in Milan, seek to address accusations of unfairness inherent in current methods of allocating emissions reductions on the basis of national wealth.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, rich countries shoulder most of the burden for cutting emissions, while developing countries, including fast-growing economies like China and India, are not required to curb greenhouse pollution. Rich countries, notably the United States, claim this gives developing countries an unfair economic advantage. China, India and other developing countries argue that developed countries have historically spewed more climate-warming gases, and developing countries need time to catch up.

The authors’ concept of ‘‘common but differentiated responsibilities’’ refers to the emissions of individuals instead of nations. Using the income distribution of a country,  they estimate how its fossil fuel CO2 emissions are distributed among its citizens,  building up a global CO2 distribution. They then propose a simple rule to derive a universal cap on global individual emissions and find corresponding limits on national aggregate emissions from this cap. All  high CO2-emitting individuals are treated the same, regardless of where in the world they live. A further degree of fairness is introduced with the idea of an emissions ‘floor’ of one tonne of CO2 per person per year. The one tonne threshold exceeds the projected emissions of 2.7 billion individuals in 2030, and would insulate the lowest one-third of the world’s emitters from CO2 reduction strategies.

Co-author Shoibal Chakravarty says that by focusing on rich people everywhere, rather than rich countries and poor ones, the system of setting carbon-cutting targets based on the number of wealthy individuals in various countries would ease developing countries into any new climate change framework.
“As countries develop — India, China, Brazil and others — over time, they’ll have more and more of these (wealthy) individuals and they’ll have a higher share of carbon reductions to do in the future”
These obligations, based on the increasing number of rich people in various countries, would kick in as each developing country hit a certain overall level of carbon emissions. This level would be set fairly high, so that economic development would not be hampered in the poorest countries, no matter how many rich people live there.

Still a long way to go, obviously, but this sounds promising. Sadly, not everyone agrees. Here is what Jim Rawles has to say on the subject:

This is the sort of fallacious logic that foments envy, and inevitably class warfare. Yes, Americans do use a disproportionately large portion of the world’s natural resources. But we also create correspondingly more with those resources. The gross domestic product (GDP) of the US is tremendous. Here is an illustration. (California, just by itself is the sixth largest economy in the world.) Consider this: Why does Kenya Airlines have Boeing 747s in their fleet? Because someone in America builds them. Could those planes be made in Kenya? No, because they have neither the expertise nor the manufacturing infrastructure. Is this situation somehow “exploitive”? No! As my old friend “Jeff Trasel” says: “Please don’t tell me that I somehow magically ‘owe the world’ more because my ‘carbon footprint’ is larger. Well, so is my productivity!” I agree with Jeff. Carbon footprint calculations and swaps of carbon credits are nothing but voodoo economics and socialist scheming.

There’s such a lot that could be said about this ill-informed rant, but I lack the time, space and indeed the patience to get involved too deeply right now. All I would say is that Mr Rawles almost certainly hasn’t bothered to read the study for himself. Why else would he be banging on about the USA’s GDP, an economic measure at the national level, when this study is all about calculating emissions responsibility on an intra-national basis. You would think that Mr Rawles would welcome these proposals, given that he spends a lot of time bemoaning international influence over American national affairs, Federal meddling in State business, and State interference in individuals’ lives. Surely a methodology which leads individuals to take responsibilty for their own actions would be welcomed by a proponent of self-sufficiency, rugged individualism and personal freedoms within a framework of rights and responsibilities.

We’re all being urged to compost more of our household waste nowadays, and quite rightly so. We receive a constant stream of advice on what to compost, how to do it, and what to do with it afterwards. But once you’ve made that leap of faith, acquired your (hopefully recycled) plastic compost bin and established a regime to stick all your suitable stuff in there, what happens? What expectations do YOU have of the end product?

Well, I finally got round to breaking open one of my bins the other day, and you can get an idea of what I found from the picture above. The bin was about half full of moist, crumbly compost, with no odour apart from a faint hint of an oak wood after rain. And for the squeamish amongst us, no creepy crawlies at all.  Visually, it’s a bit different from the stuff you buy in bags from the garden centre, being full of things like eggshell fragments, tea bag husks, fruit stones and corks. But once you’ve dug it in to your vegetable patch or spread it out on the flower beds as a mulch, it blends in pretty well. Those ‘bits’ don’t bother me at all.

What I did find a little disturbing was the persistence of some materials that I was led to believe would decompose during the composting process. The conventional wisdom nowadays is to combine the usual ‘green’ materials (vegetable scraps, grass clippings, etc) with ‘brown’, such as paper and cardboard. This makes sense on several levels; not only does it reduce the burden on the recycling collection service, it keeps the contents of the compost bin drier and hotter. I just rip up our cardboard roughly by hand and mix it in with the soggy stuff. Easy.

However… amongst the rogue items that crept in there by chance that you would never expect to rot down, I found this.

This is plastic. It is the outer layer of what appeared to be a cardboard packet, which originally contained Sainsbury’s Biscuits For Cheese. As usual, I ripped it up and stuck it in with the potato peelings, thinking the exterior design was just printed on. Sadly, I was mistaken. This is persistent stuff,  given that it has been in there for getting on for a year. The bin had had no new material added for at least six months.

Yet another example of the pitfalls of packaging made from mixed materials. We’re all aware of the issues surrounding the cartons that are increasingly used for liquid and semi-liquid products, such as those made by Tetrapak and Elopak. A sandwich of card, plastic and metal foil, these are a nightmare to recycle, requiring specialist facilities such as that established in Fife, Scotland in 2004.  Sadly, there aren’t enough of these to cope with the mountains of these cartons we dump every year. On the side of my pack of Sainsbury’s White Grape and Peach juice drink, it says proudly “Beverage Carton- widely recycled”.  Not here in the People’s Republic of Suburbia, it isn’t.  The London Borough of Bromley’s guidelines for its ‘Recycling For All’ initiative specifically exclude drinks cartons. So I’m guessing these cartons all go to landfill.

Here’s another example of mixed materials in packaging. We’re encouraged to crush our plastic bottles to exclude the air, then reseal by replacing the screw top, before putting it out for recycling. That’s fine in principle, but what would the recycling depot do with this?

This is a bottle of Sainsbury’s Peach High Juice Squash. The label quite clearly and conscientiously informs us that the bottle is made from PET, while the cap is made from HDPE.  Another nightmare for someone, maybe not my bottle in isolation, but when scaled up across the Borough, who knows how many bottles like this there are?

Small wonder, then, that the Local Government Association, whose members are desperate to meet their recycling targets, have written to the government to complain about the major supermarkets’ use of excessive packaging, plastics in particular, that are “undermining” local authorities’ efforts to recycle.

In a letter to Environment Secretary Hilary Benn, Councillor Margaret Eaton, chairman of the LGA, said:

A report published recently in the journal Global Biogeochemical Cycles says that the amount of carbon locked away in frozen soils in high Northern Hemisphere latitudes could be as much as double previous estimates.
The paper, ‘Soil organic carbon pools in the northern circumpolar permafrost region”, was written by scientists from research units in Canada, USA, Australia, Sweden and Russia. The abstract is available here, and the full report here.
Soils in the northern permafrost region comprise approximately 16% of global soil area. Previous studies’ estimates of the size of carbon pools have not accounted for deeper layers and pools. A four-year study of the latest research on permafrost, data from new drilling projects as well as the release of previously unpublished data from the Russian Academy of Sciences has led to a rethink of carbon levels. The total quantity of organic carbon in the northern permafrost region is now estimated to be 1672 Pg, of which approximately 88% occurs in what are currently perennially frozen soils and deposits. This 1672 Pg of organic carbon accounts for approximately 50% of the estimated global belowground organic carbon pool. [1 Pg, or petagram, is 1 billion metric tonnes]

In a statement to Reuters, Pep Canadell, report co-author and executive director of Australia’s Global Carbon Project, said:

“Massive amounts of carbon stored in frozen soils at high latitudes are increasingly vulnerable to exposure to the atmosphere.
“Projections show that almost all near-surface permafrost will disappear by the end of this century exposing large carbon stores to decomposition and release of greenhouse gases.”

Canadell claims that the melting of only 10% of the permafrost could lead to the release of an additional 80 parts per million of CO2 equivalent into the atmosphere, equivalent to a ‘global warming’ of about 0.7 degrees Celsius according to current models.

Climate processes  such as this are a minefield of non-linear systems, and however much care is devoted to devising our computer models, new variables can always throw a spanner in the works. Heat generated by increased microbial activity in the soil could lead to sustained long-term emissions of CO2 and methane. In addition, lakes formed as the permafrost thaws would draw heat to deeper layers and bring methane to the surface from subterranean pockets.

OK, yes, I know. The word ‘estimate’ crops up a lot in all this. How could it not? Unless you know of a way of weighing the permafrost precisely and accurately, it’s inevitable. These figures are huge, and I’m sure there are people out there who don’t care to believe them. But even if this report is out by a factor of 10, this is still scary stuff, the sort of information that should be made available promptly to a wide audience. The abstract tells us that the report was submitted on 13th August 2008, accepted 3rd April 2009 and published 27th June 2009. Why does it take so long to perform peer reviews of important work like this?

A new documentary series kicked off on the UK Discovery Channel yesterday. ‘Ways to Save the Planet‘ explores what happens when, in the channel’s own words, “what if?” meets “why not?”, as “some of the world’s leading scientists” put the most ambitious geo-engineering ideas to the test in order to tackle global climate change. The programme features a series of large-scale experiments that are the brainchildren of a team of “uncompromising visionaries”.

Wrapping Greenland
Dr  Jason Box, a glaciologist from Ohio State University, wants to prevent glaciers from melting by covering them with reflective geo-textile blankets.

Raining Forests
Scientist Mark Hodges believes he has devised a way to reforest large areas of Earth from the air, by using an aircraft to drop tens of thousands of canisters, each holding a tree seedling.

Brighter Earth
John Latham, an atmospheric physicist based at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, and Stephen Salter, an Edinburgh University engineer, believe that by changing the size of water droplets in a cloud they can increase the cloud’s ability to reflect the sun and stop global warming. Their vision is to build a flotilla of ships that will roam the world’s oceans and seed clouds with minute particulates.

Infinite Winds
Fred Ferguson, a Canadian engineer specializing in airships, has designed a revolutionary wind turbine that will use the constant winds that exist at 1,000 feet above sea level to produce energy.

Hungry Oceans
Oceans cover 70 percent of our planet and are one of the most important carbon sinks we have, but the phytoplankton that convert CO2 into living matter are declining – and many scientists believe that Climate Change is the culprit. Dr  Brian von Herzen of The Climate Foundation joins forces with marine biologists at the University of Hawaii and Oregon State University to deploy three wave powered pumps in the North Pacific in an attempt to restore this critical natural mixing effect.

Space Sunshield
Astronomer and professor Roger Angel thinks he can diffract the power of the sun by placing trillions of lenses in space and creating a 100,000-square-mile sunshade, using electromagnetic propulsion to get the lenses into space.

Orbital Power Plant
Former NASA physicist John Mankins has a plan to send thousands of satellites into space, which will gather energy from the sun and then beam the solar energy down to Earth as microwave energy, to be collected by antennae on the ground for conversion into electricity.

Fixing Carbon
Canadian professor David Keith, the 2006 Canadian Geographic “Environmental Scientist of the Year,” is building a prototype of a machine to scrub Co2 from the air. It will suck ambient air in at one end, spray it with sodium hydroxide solution, then expel clean air out of the other end.

Am I the only one whose heart sinks after reading about these half-baked pseudo solutions straight off the pages of Astounding Science Fiction? In the first place, we are already right in the middle of an enormous planetary-scale experiment as our stupidity and greed continues to throw our world’s systems into disarray. Secondly, while there’s a lot of “what if?” here, the only “why not?” questions seem to revolve around whether the transition from the back of a fag packet to the ‘real’ world is a successful one within the restricted parameters of the experiment.

And finally…. as the Discovery Channel itself says: “You’ve heard the dire warnings and seen the detailed slide shows, and you’ve even bought that energy efficient light bulb. You wonder, though, how can small, individual measures like switching to compact flourescent [sic] lightbulbs and using canvas shopping bags in lieu of plastic be enough to save the planet?”

And that’s the problem. We have an impending global catastrophe that was brought about by the combined impact of billions of individual decisions and actions. Where is the incentive for us, as individuals, to modify our behaviour if we are continually presented with large-scale, centralised, hi-tech solutions. The boffins in the basement may have helped to create this mess, but if they’re all beavering away on our behalf to fix it, we don’t have to do anything, right?

Maybe there is a way we can help. Why not play Discovery Channel’s online game ‘Extreme Earth‘?

You have been given the ultimate position of Global Caretaker of Planet Earth. From your control panel you have the power to control the fine balance of the Earth’s physical makeup. Using your knowledge of the causes and effects of global warming, you must make decisions to fix the problems as they occur. The Earth’s future is in the balance – can you meet the challenge?

Yes, that should do the trick.