Clew Bay

photo credit: Éole Wind Creative Commons license: some rights reserved.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Seán MacBride wrote to the Taoiseach in April 1978, expressing concern about the nuclear plant plans and urging an examination of alternative sources of energy such as solar, wind, tidal and wave power.

He pointed to a plan that had been discussed decades earlier, involving the conversion of Clew Bay into a reservoir for the production of electricity. “Seventy years ago such a scheme might well have been uneconomical and regarded as impractical, but would it be so in the circumstances of today?”

The Irish Times also reports on the controversy surrounding the proposed nuclear plant at Carnsore, Co Wexford. The Taoiseach, Jack Lynch, to his credit, foresaw contracting oil supplies by the turn of the century.

Full report at the Irish Times.

Happy 2009, everyone.

With maverick flair and a strategist’s disdain for accepted wisdom, Jaime Lerner re-invented urban space in his native Curitiba, Brazil. Along the way he managed to revolutionize bus transit, awaken green consciousness in a populace accustomed to litter and blight, and change the way city planners and bureaucrats world-wide conceive what’s possible within the tangled structure of the metropolitan landscape.

With maverick flair and a strategist’s disdain for accepted wisdom, Jaime Lerner re-invented urban space in his native Curitiba, Brazil. Along the way he managed to revolutionize bus transit, awaken green consciousness in a populace accustomed to litter and blight, and change the way city planners and bureaucrats world-wide conceive what’s possible within the tangled structure of the metropolitan landscape.

If we had something like what is shown in this video in Dublin, I would happily say bye bye to my dream of free-at-access transport. as this would cover many of the benefits I had thought of.

Actually, we could do it very quickly, combined with some of the ideas in the video below. An 18 metre streetcar, manufactured by Wrights of Ballymena, is supposed to have been on test for the last year or so, though I haven’t seen any sign of it. See my Streetcars of Desire.

Anyway, Jaime Lerner does my heart good. I hope he does yours too. (Yes, it’s another TED video ;>)

Note: Search for Transported to bring up all my posts on transport

But this is something that has only recently been discovered.

It turns out, that if all United States power companies were to upgrade to new electricity meters today, America would save roughly $35 billion in energy costs over twenty years and it would eliminate the need for around 625 power plants.

625 power plants. Everything is on an enormous scale in the US, but it must make one pause, even in a small country like Ireland, where the gurus keep telling us we need nuclear power. I hear people who were dead against it agreeing with it now, so the propaganda is working.

I think we must have more sophisticated meters in Ireland than in the US, as storage heaters are based on cheap night time electricity, are they not?

There is change afoot with regard to energy meters, oddly enough. As far as I can make out it’s to do with SEM, or the Single Energy Market, between the Republic and Northern Ireland. I haven’t the technical head to work it all out, or whether the proposed new meters are more sophisticated, and energy-saving, than the ones we have, but the Commission for Energy Regulation posted pdfs of a Metering Code in June, and also has a link to the All Ireland Project, with more pdfs.

So all you meter geeks, get stuck in.

With strong signs of a depression in China akin to what happened in Japan in the nineties, and for the same reason – but which could have far greater consequences for the world; and with peak oil just a few years away we have to keep on the ball with regards to energy and much else.

EcoGeek: Why your electricity meter sucks

Bank for International Settlements warns of Great Depression dangers from credit spree

Or maybe the editorial staff, in common with most people, thought, so what? Most people, and that seems to include all our politicians and political parties, think that there will be a long decline in peak oil. We have loads of time to keep going on the way we do, wasting practically all our resources.

But that just ain’t so. When oil – and gas – peak, the decline is thought to be about 3% a year. That doesn’t seem like much, at first glance. But consider this, from the Life After the Oil Crash website

The issue is not one of “running out” so much as it is not having enough to keep our economy running. In this regard, the ramifications of Peak Oil for our civilization are similar to the ramifications of dehydration for the human body. The human body is 70 percent water. The body of a 200 pound man thus holds 140 pounds of water. Because water is so crucial to everything the human body does, the man doesn’t need to lose all 140 pounds of water weight before collapsing due to dehydration. A loss of as little as 10-15 pounds of water may be enough to kill him.

In a similar sense, an oil-based economy such as ours doesn’t need to deplete its entire reserve of oil before it begins to collapse. A shortfall between demand and supply as little as 10-15 percent is enough to wholly shatter an oil-dependent economy and reduce its citizenry to poverty.

Are you scared yet?

It’s even worse.

The effects of even a small drop in production can be devastating. For instance, during the 1970s oil shocks, shortfalls in production as small as 5% caused the price of oil to nearly quadruple. The same thing happened in California a few years ago with natural gas: a production drop of less than 5% caused prices to skyrocket by 400%.

To be really scared, all you have to do is read through this website. The nub is this: if a five percent drop in oil production causes a 400% increase in the cost of oil, what do you think a 9% drop in as little as three years, and a 18% drop in 6 years, and a 32% drop in 12 years, would do? This is not a blip in production as in the 1970s. This is a permanent, inevitiable reduction. And once an oil well reaches a certain level of depletion, the cost of extracting from it makes the oil recovered uneconomical – to put it in a nutshell.

We rely on oil for everything, from toothbrushes to the production of solar panels and windmills.

This website is utterly bleak, offering not a glimmer of hope, and it’s well backed-up by facts and research. It’s not run by an eco-freak in sandals (Personally I’ve nothing against eco-freaks. Some of my best friends, etc, but I point this out to caution cynics to read on). He’s a lawyer, and he has marshalled his facts well.

There are tiny glimmers of hope – but only if the world wakes up fast.

I’ve mentioned Ted Talks before, I think. It’s a great video (requires Flash) resource for anyone thinking about the world we live in.
John Doerr is a venture capitalist who was woken up to reality by his 15 year old daughter, and he and his firm, KPCB, spent a year trying to find a solution to global warming. Their hardnosed research made him very scared indeed.

One fact he mentioned that I hadn’t heard before is that the US has enough geothermal energy to power the country for a thousand years. He also points out that while Exxon earns $1billion a day, the total US research budget into geothermal energy, a resource used by American Indians for thousands of years, is $20million.

Of course Ireland has the Atlantic Ocean, and this is being ignored in pretty much the same way, with just token amounts put into researching its potential.

Doerr quotes Kleiner:

There is a time when panic is the appropriate response
-Eugene Kleiner

So please, negotiators for the next Irish Government, wake up, and panic.

Life After the Oil Crash

John Doerr’s TED Talk

Ireland has joined three northern European countries to launch an international campaign against the use of nuclear energy as a solution to climate change.

The group, which includes Norway, Iceland and Austria, has also called for an independent international safety review to be carried out on the controversial Thorp nuclear processing plant at Sellafield, which has been closed for nearly two years following the discovery of a large leak of nuclear waste.

Environment ministers of all four countries met in Dublin on Sunday and yesterday morning for talks amid a growing debate in Europe on the role of nuclear energy. In a joint statement yesterday they described nuclear energy as “economically and environmentally untenable”.

The statement said: “We voice serious concern that nuclear energy is being presented as a solution to climate change. It is our collective view that the current debate seeks to downplay the environmental, waste, proliferation, nuclear liability and safety issues and seeks to portray nuclear energy as a clean, safe and problem-free response to climate change”.

It said that the “inherent risks and problems” of nuclear energy remained.

see The Nuclear Illusion, at the Rocky Mountain Institute

NB This is a very rough draft. I originally posted this on the alternative party forum, now defunct, and haven’t had time to update it. Hopefully seeing it on a public space again will prompt me to work on it.

DRAFT

Oil, and therefore petrol, will run dry in the next 15-20 years. Earlier estimates put it at 30 years or more, but didn’t take account of the rise of China and India as first world economies – which in today’s terms, means enormous consumers of oil.

I believe that when the concept of holistic accounting is considered, the cost of free transport would be considerably cheaper than any conventional figure. Holistic accounting takes in the social, health and environmental enhancements and savings involved in any costing. The health consequences of doing nothing will in themselves put a dent in any conventional budget:
“The report just released on Greenhouse Gas Abatement Strategy shows that there will be a 180 per cent rise in emissions from cars and trucks over the next 10 years if nothing is done. It shows this will cause huge damage to people’s health. Already EU limits for emissions from cars and trucks are massively exceeded in the Dublin region. (Vincent Browne, The Irish Times, September 20th, 2000).

As for the financial benefits, the Dublin Chamber of Commerce estimates that the traffic chaos is costing Ireland €3 billion a year.

But what about private sector transport services? Public funding doesn’t imply taking away people’s livelihoods. They should be funded in the same way, subject to a high standard of service being implemented. According to the Minister for Social and Family Affairs, Mary Coughlan, along with Bus Átha Cliath, Bus Éireann and Iarnród Éreann, up to 80 private companies already participate in the Free Travel Scheme, so there is a precedent for subsidising private transport companies.

The principle is already there, in other words.

The question that is never asked about subsidising private transport will of course be immediately asked when in comes to the public sphere – where will the money come from?
“Last year (2004) 528 people died on the roads of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland; several thousand more were seriously injured. The death toll on Ireland’s roads over the last 30 years is about 20,000, although advances in vehicle and road engineering and changes in the behaviour of road-users mean that the number of people killed each year is now half what it was 30 years ago. Each of those deaths is a family tragedy and many need not have happened. Bad driving is often a cause of road deaths, but in many instances neither the vehicle nor the road have provided road-users with adequate protection. see European Road Assessment Program

The Alberta Medical Association estimated that in 1999 traffic crash costs in Alberta,
Canada total $3.8 billion (1998 Canadian dollars), based on a value of $2.9 million
per fatality, $100,000 per injury, and $8,000 for each property-damage-only
collision.53 This averages about $515 dollars per capita ($335 U.S.), $740 per motor
vehicle ($471), and 3.7¢ per motor vehicle-kilometre (4.0¢ U.S. per vehicle-mile).
NB this link is to a pdf file.

At 528 fatalities in Ireland, that would appear to be a cost of 1.125billion Euro. That’s not counting the cost of injury.

It will in part be a long term investment in savings in public health costs, fines for not meeting our Kyoto Protocol agreements, lives saved, and world wide publicity for Ireland. These are beyond my capacity to estimate, but might make a nice thesis for an student economist. Directly in the short to medium term it would come from a parity of investment principle, and possibly charges similar to those in Ken Livingstone’s scheme for London. And not least, by the savings to the economy through reduced traffic congestion, as highlighted by the Dublin Chamber of Commerce (see link above).

I believe a small towns in Holland and the US provide free transport, but Ireland would be the first country per se to do so. Let’s be the first to do worthwhile things, especially now that we have a smoking ban success, and stop looking to Britain and the US before we do anything.

The advantages immediately appararent are as follows:

* Immediate and significant transfer of wealth to the poor and less well-off.
* Increased access to social and economic activity for the same groups
* Greater parity of investment in public and private transport (important principle)
* Greater speed of bus journeys
* Tax payers would see value for money. The tax payer pays, the tax payer benefits.
* Greater sense of public ownership
* Zero robberies and reduced assaults on bus drivers and staff. Reduced workload for drivers and
inspectors making confrontation with the public unlikely.
* No more wasting of inspector and court time bringing prosecutions
* Coupled with the proper implementation of QBCs, greatly reduced traffic congestion. This has
obvious large savings for businesses etc
* Reduced inflation.
* Reduced stress for the travelling public, therefore greater productivty and health; more free
time for personal and family interests
* Reduced oil imports and dependency. Reduction in car imports.
* Reduced traffic accidents as outlined above
* Improvement in air quality, and consequent improvement in health
* Significant step towards implementation of Kyoto Principles – a national obligation
* Alleviation of rural and suburban isolation – less depression
* The benefit to students and their families would amount to the equivalent of a significant
increase in student grants
* The present cost of pensioner and social welfare free travel would be absorbed into overall cost,
with greater dignity for pensioners and social welfare recipients
* Cut in administration, accounting, printing and security costs
* Redeployment of inspectors to raise standards
* Liberation of management from profit-driven to service-driven mentality
* Tourist relief and delight – a tourist attraction in itself. World kudos for Ireland.

I also advocate the scrapping of the extension of Luas lines, to be replaced by Streetcars – beautiful a bus-tram hybrid manufactured by Wrights of Ballymena. See my Streetcars of Desire entry.