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peak oil wake up call

10 February, 2010 – 23:02

Peak oil hit the mainstream today with a hard hitting report from the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil & Energy Security.

These are mainstream companies – Virgin, Stagecoach, Scottish and Southern Energy – rather than peak oil outsiders, though the senior oil industry people in there are only recently retired ones. The report warns that oil shortages, insecurity of supply and price volatility are likely to start destabilising economic, political and social activity in this country within five years. The comparison is to the credit crunch, which pretty much nearly brought down the economy were it not for the massive bail-outs and huge debts that were taken on by the public sector. The oil crunch will catch us out in the same way unless policies to address Peak Oil are a priority for any government formed after the elections in May.

Even then the scale of the challenge will be immense. As the report points out…

The speed with which the UK would need to mobilise for a ‘descent’ peak oil scenario, much less a ‘collapse’ scenario, exceeds anything that has yet been considered in the climate-change policy-response arena. Formulating a plan for either the ‘collapse’ or the ‘descent’ scenarios will require an entirely new framework for energy thinking in the UK.

It’s an important report, though reading it feels a bit like being lectured to by a schizophrenic psychopath. When you think of ExxonMobil’s well documented funding of hundreds of climate change denial organisations, or BP and Shell’s massive lobbying and investment in locking us into a tailspin over the hydrocarbon precipice, what gall for corporations to now be telling us that we need to be heading in a very different direction!

But of course, none of the big oil companies have put their names to this report. These are a different set of companies and they say plainly what they hope to achieve:

We hope our work to date will act as a wake-up call for fellow companies, for government, and for consumers. For one is surely needed.

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national british politics looks a bit iffy

1 February, 2010 – 21:58

It’s emerged that inequality has reached its highest level in Britain since the middle of the 20th century. So says the government’s own panel on inequality, commissioned by women’s minister Harriet Harman. Most other European countries are more equal than Britain, save for Poland, Italy and Portugal.

The big rise in inequality in Britain occurred in the 1980s, but it hasn’t stopped under Labour, they’ve only slowed it down.

The report above has a bizarre quote from shadow women’s minister Teresa May saying: “It is truly shocking that after 13 years of a Labour government, inequality has grown to the highest levels seen since the Second World War. It is unbelievable that Labour thinks it can claim to be the party of aspiration when its failure to tackle the causes of poverty have let down so many lives.”

Don’t you think that’s such a brazen and outrageous thing to say? She’s basically saying, “come on Labour, you’re the party of sorting out poverty and mopping up the mess that the Tories made, deal with it before we get back into power and start widening that gulf between the rich and the poor again!”

Furthermore, the latest British Social Attitudes survey seems to show that the electorate has become more right-wing under Labour. The proportion of voters who favour redistribution of wealth is down from half in 1994 to a third now; attitudes towards benefits have similarly hardened. The British Social Attitudes survey argues that “public attitudes towards the role of government vary across countries and change in ways which are consistent with changes in party platforms” and that “the decline in left-wing attitudes among the British electorate between 1996 and 2006 clearly suggests the influence of New Labour”.

As Peter Wilby puts it: “The voters presumably decided that, if Labour did not subscribe to left-wing principles, nobody else need do so.”

OK, that’s probably pretty depressing, but you’ve just got to look for hope elsewhere I guess! I think I’m taking solace in single issue campaigning and local community politics, where there is loads of brilliant vibrant good stuff happening. Perhaps the future is a sort of new Green socialism, which arises out of a burgeoning and maturing environmental movement rather than the twentieth century class structures of the Labour party. What I see in schools at work seems to be very hopeful, the next generation has sustainability, Fairtrade and climate change on the agenda throughout school life in a way we never had when I was young.

There’s a good new wave of political action on inequality brewing too, driven by the incontrovertible body of research which shows that reducing inequality is the single most effective way way we can create better societies with less violence, better mental health, longer lifespans and more happiness. To a certain extent it is a way of side stepping old disagreements about inequality between the political left and right. Humans are fundamentally designed to thrive in more equal societies.

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død snø

14 January, 2010 – 23:00

Matt, Andrew G and I sat down last night to watch the joyous Norwegian zombie movie that you can’t help but love: Død Snø, or Dead Snow.

The film focuses on a group of hapless young medical students having a break in a log cabin in the remote snowy Nordic mountains under which are buried … frozen Nazi zombies!

Obviously Nazi zombies is a great gimmick and they don’t disappoint. They look great with their grey faces and camp evil uniforms. There’s a wonderful scene where loads and loads of them climb out from under the snow and stand there looking fantastic against the white mountain slopes.

The stark white snow is also a good canvas for the copious quantities of blood spilt throughout this film’s many inventive slaughter scenes. Beautiful red on white, splattery and bright.

The film revels in its gore, it’s funny in the tradition of Evil Dead, but with more intestines. Indeed, there’s even a fabulous scene where one young student is hanging off a cliff clutching to an implausibly long length of intestine attached to a Nazi zombie with its eyes bulging and black blood spurting spasmodically as it is impaled around a tree.

Død Snø isn’t a brilliant film, but it is very entertaining, stylish, assured, with a rocking Norwegian heavy metal soundtrack. And it builds towards a suitably silly and gory finale that leaves you with a happy smile on your face.

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monday blues

11 January, 2010 – 16:58

The beginning of 2010 has seen a fair few pieces of bad news hitting home. Times are a little hard and cold right now, like the bitter weather, but the thaw will come.

The small tragedy closest to me and Matt was the death of our dear old cat, Mouse, last week. Over the last six years she’s been a troublesome, demanding but ultimately loving companion. She mellowed out a lot in the last three years, becoming ever more endearing. But I think we were both surprised by how hard it was when the time came to say goodbye.

She had been unwell before Christmas and then went downhill quite sharply, not really eating and getting thin and weak. She was still Mouse and still had her moments, but it was clear she wasn’t going to get better. We took her to the vet for the last time on 4th January.

We were pretty unconsolable afterwards and had to spend the afternoon putting all her things away and rearranging the flat to distract ourselves. It so happened that we had taken the Monday and Tuesday off work, which really helped. The death of a cat is not the sort of thing I would ever request compassionate leave for, yet it struck me what a serious event this can be, one that society may not always respect, though friends have been very kind to us.

Still, the thaw will come.

posted in animals | 1 comment »

wassail! drink hail!

3 January, 2010 – 19:42

Matt and I went to one of our favourite annual rituals today, the Twelfth Night celebrations on the South Bank. We took our own mulled ale (wassail) and helped to drink some old English toasts to the river Thames, the Globe Theatre, and the George Inn on Borough High Street.

It was very cold, freezing in fact, so the Mummers play by the riverside was performed vigorously and in good time!

Wassail to the new year and the new decade!

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copenhagen fails

18 December, 2009 – 19:19

Hugo Chávez sums it up the best, condemning the “pitiful” sums of money being offered to poor countries to adapt to climate change.

$10bn a year is a joke. The military expenditure of the US is $700bn per year. If the climate were a bank it would have been saved already.

But this isn’t Babylon 5. Copenhagen was never our last or best hope. Politicians alone, and certainly not corporations, a highly flawed institutional form if there ever was one, can’t deliver the change we need.

The long term structural changes to our economies and societies will require a large, powerful, global people’s movement that wields an enormous amount of political power, to build the change from below and force political elites to act in the common interest. Building that movement has only just begun.

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nine lessons and carols

18 December, 2009 – 18:44

Matt and I were at the very enjoyable and good value for money Nine Lessons and Carols for Godless People last night. It had quite a furtive geeky atmosphere which I wasn’t expecting, but on reflection that does make sense. Science and atheism seem more embattled in the public and media domain than they ought to be really. You can’t move without bumping into something homeopathic, religious, science-denying or superstitious these days. Irrationalism is on the march!

But it wasn’t at the UCL Bloomsbury last night. It was a marvellous bill, a mix of comedy, music and informative lecture. There was Robyn Hitchcock doing his droll slightly mad monologues and a song about trilobites. There was Johnny Ball doing dirty old man jokes and being contagiously enthusiastic about the amount of amazing knowledge we have at our fingertips in this country. The boyish and clever Baba Brinkman did an amazing rap re-working Dead Prez’s “I’m a African” so that it was a self-reflective ode to evolution and common humanity. Barry Cryer got us all on our feet screaming “peace and quiet” over and over again. Josie Long explored with us what ghosts might eat (if we were foolish enough to believe in them of course).

My favourite one was fast talking and enthusiastic physicist Brian Cox, who is working at the Large Hadron Collider. He gave a presentation about simplicity and complexity in the universe, about very very big things and very very small things. He pointed out how everything in the universe is made of just a few elementary leptons and quarks, glued together by just four forces.

There was a great bit quite reminiscent of the old Powers of Ten video where he used Hubble pictures to zoom into one piece of the night sky, the size of a 5p coin. As you zoomed in, what was empty space filled up with growing specks of light. Each speck of light was in fact a galaxy, there are over 100 billion galaxies each containing over 100 billion stars. The universe is indeed extremely big.

Brian also showed us some stirring pictures of Earth from space. One was the famous 1968 picture of our world from the moon, the picture that is sometimes said to have launched the environmental movement.

The picture I hadn’t seen before, but which moved me greatly, was the farthest away picture of the Earth, taken by Voyager from 4 billion miles away as it left the Solar System. It’s the little dot in the photo below.

Brian then made a plea not to cut funding for the kind of scientific research that leads us to explore these vast distances, pointing out simply that it helps us to understand ourselves. Much as an archaeologist or anthropologist studies the farthest reaches of human history or cultural variation in order to shed light on our own condition.

He ended with a TS Eliot quote from the Four Quartets, which did actually make me cry.

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

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forbidden door

28 October, 2009 – 22:26

Our last London Film Festival film last night, Forbidden Door, was an Indonesian psycho-thriller directed by Joko Anwar.

I was expecting a full on horror film in the South Korean style, but it was more of a mix of genres. The opening credits were all 1950s Hitchcock and retro James Bond shapes of bright colours, even though the film seems to be set in the present day. Much of it is classic horror movie, but there are also some genuinely funny gory scenes with Cronenberg blood spurting all over the place too, and dark Freudian and sexual themes.

On the one hand I liked the fact the film went off on its own unclassifiable path, on the other hand I did find the mix of styles unsatisfyingly incoherent at times. I would have liked the horror to have escalated a level too. A lot of the suspense and fear had dissipated by the end of the film, though there are a couple of good shocks for later on.

Overall though, well worth seeing! A very distinctive and competent voice.

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valhalla rising

25 October, 2009 – 22:46

Went with Alex F and Steve W to see Valhalla Rising, a pared down brutal dark ages film, with a group of Vikings journeying across a strange desolate landscape to find Jerusalem.

They travel apparently from Scotland, across the sea, to the New World. The scenery is bleak and misty, there are no built structures anywhere in the film, just bogs and hills and rocks. There is blood and madness, and in the end pretty much everyone dies.

A D&D fighting fantasy film that’s a significant cut above the competition.

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the wind journeys

24 October, 2009 – 22:26

Matt and I went to see The Wind Journeys, a beautiful London Film Festival offering about an old accordion player who travels across Colombia with a teenager seeking to return his cursed accordion to his former mentor.

It’s a slow moving film set across vast beautiful country landscapes, with occasional musical set pieces, like an dramatic accordion duel in one town, where two players improvise verses against each other until one falters.

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