Carbon capitualtion

This is no new victory.

We see a repeated retreat from wrong-headed thinking and advance again with more wrong-headed thinking.

The Earth is being plundered, we've dug too much of it up so now we think it's a fantastic idea to bury our carbon. A solution, certainly, a postponement of tough decisions, though in itself something of great damage.

To pump gas into disused oil and gas fields. Has anyone considered the tectonic impact?
Or the fact that poison is now being pumped underground? Will other gases from coal be released or pumped underground too and, wait up a second - we're still using coal, still digging from underground things that should have lain there for centuries.

This Earth is a strange and complex thing. It's built in ways we're not given to understand. One thing is sure, it doesn't like the digging. Another is, it won't enjoy having poison pumped into it.

Don't come with these cries of "But what else can we do?". Plenty. Technological priorities should be carbin free not carbon captured or scrubbed. We can be fossil free in fifty years, we just need to keep moving, keep researching and stop piling effort and energies into half-answers that leave us with a greater problem.

I've written previously that carbon is not the issue, but a shoe-horning of a much wider substantial debate about where we are going, how we want to live.

This by the way, extends to carbon trading, something I'll write on again. That a problem which has commoditisation at its root is solved by further commoditisation - of the air, people, of the air! - shows similar wrong-headedness as that described above. Clutching at straws while the whole ship goes down.

You think I'm dramatic? Take a look around!

Radicalism has never been more necessary. The time for free-thinking is come.

(There's some here)

A sober post

There was funny time when Britain was doing really well, the economy was singing and Public Borrowing was still at 3.5%. This was about 2 years ago.

I would like to see some figures on how much of the deficit is going where. A lot must be from falling tax receipts and rising benefits and there are some job creation schemes but a huge chunk of the rest must be from bank subsidies.

This is entirely the wrong channel to go through, although I accpet this wasn't easy to see three months ago. Banks are moving from the central mechanism of the economy to one of its servants and filling them with cash is like piling bricks under the high side of the leaning tower of Pisa.

There's got to be a more decentralised way of getting money into the hands of people and easing the massive structural shift the economy is experiencing.

Oh wait, there is.

Genius!

"The G20 agreed to allow the IMF to create $250bn of Special Drawing Rights, its own currency, comprising dollars, euros, yen and sterling, boosting the foreign exchange reserves of every country. Most of this will go to the big economies, but poorer countries facing budgetary strains will gain new cash." [link]

From the same article:

"Only about $80bn will be going to all the middle-income and poor countries combined [of the $250bn]"