The People's Democratic Republic of Birmingham

Whenever I hear someone claim that nuclear power is “carbon free” I start to get violent urges … I find myself wanting to punch the TV or radio….

The reason is this; tell me what carbon free technologies you are going to use to mine the uranium, transport it to the nuclear power station, then take the waste away and safely store it for the hundred thousand years it will take to become safe.

What’s that you say…. you only meant to say that the actual generation process produces no carbon? – you didn’t mean that the entire lifecycle of producing fuel doesn’t produce any?

Well guess what – the universe doesn’t care about your motives; only results matter!

Any analysis of the mining and transportation of uranium and the transport and storage of nuclear waste will ALWAYS show carbon being produced until and unless we have 100% carbon free transport and storage!

So – we not only have to content with the nuclear waste produced by this process, but also the carbon it vomits forth… does anyone out there STILL want to press for nuclear power?

I’ve a nasty suspicion that several current trends will converge on pay-per-view TV gladiatorial combat to the death…

I mean look at what we have at the moment; reality TV that explicitly sets out to humiliate and offend the particiapants, together with a growing underclass of the poor in the developing world.

Put these together and you will get some desperately poor nation that is willing to host the gladiator games and sell access to them via pay-per-view internet TV together with enough desperately poor people willing to take part.

Imagine what the market would be like! – all those jaded lard-arses would just lap it up. In fact I am worried that by articulating the concept in this blog I am calling it into existence.

If it does happen – remember you saw it here first.

Another idea; let’s roof roads with solar panels that also act as water collecters.

Think about it; two hazzards of driving would be avoided: you wouldn’t get sun in your eyes and rain on the windscreen. Driving would be made more pleasent and safer.

Also we could harvest all of that power that falls as sunshine onto the roads; I’ve no idea how much this would come to – but at a rough guess if we roofed most of the motorways in England we’d have enough power for the whole country’s needs. Also; I for one would not want to use rainwater from a road for anything – including washing… but rainwater collected before it hits the road – well, that’s different… at least we could use it to fill reservoirs and then purify it for drinking.

Also: what is one other major by-product of road travel? – a shedload of wind! Let’s put small vertically mounted windmills at the side of roads and use some of the wind from passing cars to generate power.

We have a hell of a lot of roads on a very small island; let’s at least use the damn things for the environment instead of against it!

Anyone else noticed how many HUGE poster adverts are appearing alongside motorways nowadays?

Is no one else uncomfortable with the concept of something designed to distract you being placed alongside the road that you are driving down at 100 miles per hour?

Come on now! Surely this is a non-brainer! Let’s NOT distract people who are in control of several tons of metal at high speed!

This is yet another example of the tragedy of the commons; small numbers of people (farmers with land next to motorways) are able to make some money from an activity that ultimately we all end up paying more for. If we don’t pay for it directly when an amphetamine crazed 20 hour shift lorry driver drives into the back of us then we pay indirectly when the emergency services have to scrape whoever he did drive into off the road.

I can understand why farmers want to do it though; the way they are screded by the big supermarkets is just disgusting – but that is another issue. Let’s just ban motorway advertising 100% and stop allowing drivers to be distracted when we would all prefer that their attention is on not killing other road users.

I still find it hard to believe that the USA uses more power in the summer cooling themselves down than they do in the winter heating themselves. This is because the Peoples Republic has traditionally been a cold place, not much given to warm summers…. although I suspect this might change as climate change starts to kick in.

Anyway; if you need to use air conditioning why not make it illegal to sell or install them unless they are connected to solar panels? Isn’t the requirement for air conditioning a warm climate? – which is created by the sun…? I know that they might not be suitable ALL the time – so we hook them up to a wind turbine too – I mean, for crying out loud – you only need any conditioning when it is sunny!!

And how’s this for a radical, dangerous point of view… one of the main by-products of aircon is heat… why not pump this waste heat into the water supply?! You still take warm showers when it is sunny,and yet the heat you have removed from your house you just get rid of instead of using it! Just say to hell with it and pass a law making it illegal to dump the heat if anyone within a 100 meters of you could use it! – and the government pays the cost of putting the necessary pipework in and you get paid in carbon credits for the power the recipient of the heat didn’t need to use.

Come on people! This is basic stuff! – and it is needed for the preservation of our most valuable assett – the small, non-renewable life support system we call Earth.

In so many of the arguments around the whole issue of climate change you get people like the current President of the USA and the chairman of the CBI in England who absolutely will not tolerate any measures whatsover that have any impact on economic growth.

Now – industry and business are not universally a bad thing; without them we would not be reading and writing blogs on the net after all. But in a lot of ways their unchecked growth and rapacious consumption of resources can be be blamed for the whole mess that we are in.

But: we are faced with a stark choice; either we pay some substantial sums to stop the greenhouse effect making our planet unlivable – or climate change runs away and civilization becomes untenable.

We have to pay SOMETHING – and if the choice is a few years of lower or negative growth or the death of humanity then I know which one I would choose!

When will business realise that you cannot eat money? If there is nothing to buy – if the climate crashes and no one is able to grow any crops – then there is nothing to spend your money on.

One of the biggest contributors to climate change is the aviation industry… but stopping carbon dioxide gettng into the atmosphere does NOT mean giving up all air travel.

At the most it means accepting travelling directly between places at about 120 miles per hour instead of 500….

All we need to do is to create some decent airships – you know – the ligher than air ones. Except this time we make their lift come from an INNERT gas like helium – NOT highly inflammable hydrogen. Then we make their energy come from solar panels that cover them all over, and green electricity that charges their batteries when they are at rest – and maybe we use hydrogen as a fuel IF we can make it safe.

These things are about a billion times safer than aircraft: can you imagine one of them crashing? – it would go something like this: “Ladies and gentlemen; we have just suffered catastrophic engine fires in all 8 engines and as a result we are totally without power. We will start to drag along the ground in about 5 hours; if you want to get off before then you can parachute to the ground. If you have never parachuted before then wee have a one hour course…..”

These things are inherently safe – as well as clean. Can you imagine one of those hi-jacker bigots trying to crash one of THESE into the World Trade Center?! – it would’ve BOUNCED!

Of course – to get it accepted you need to change peoples attitudes: the so called “free market” t hat means that people do not pay an accurate cost for the damage they cause to the environment means that people now expect and demand 500 mile per hour transport. So: you make them pay a tax that totally covers the damage they cause and allows their carbon to offset the damage. This means that any high flying business person who genuinely DOES need to be there tomorrow still can be – and everyone else gets to fly directly from city centre to city centre at a height that means you can see what is going on on the ground and in an environment that is NOT like a cattle truck.

All it takes is some political will power to make the air travel industry pay a realistic price for the damage they cause – and a visionary to implement the green powered airship company….

Particularly when someone can particpate in the online “community” by writing a compelling, inspiring blog…

… and yet cannot get somewhere to live?!

I mean – what is more important to you? – the ability to go online or having somewhere to live?

You have to think that we have got something wrong when a homeless person finds it easier to get online than it is to find somewhere to live. I think that this is a comment both on the ubiquity of technology and also on how little we care about the people who cannot compete at the same feverish, insane level as the rest of us.

As soon as you weaken for a moment – as soon as your grip slips – then you can slide down the greasy pole into homelessness.

So tonight on your way home, give that poor sod begging 20 pence; do you SERIOUSLY think they are begging for fun? – or because it is an easy option?

And if you ever get some spare cash in your PayPal account, get on over to the wandering scribe and donate a quid or so.

Whilst I was waiting at the station the other day with Number One Son, waiting for the Significant Other to get in from her job, I met an old, old friend whose current business ventures I want to shamelessly plug.

You see, here in Birmingham there used to be an unspeakably excellent science fiction, fantasy and horror bookshop known as Andromeda. This place had been around for years – I myself had stuck with them through at least two moves and they just kept getting better. I used to go in there once a month with a few quid in my pocket to stock up on good quality speculative fiction, and I used to sidle up to the manager – a chap called Rog Peyton – and say something like: “Rog – I’m in the mood for a bit of post-apocalypse fiction today: what you got for me?” – or “I’ve a hankering for some full-on, hardcore fantasy; got anything you’d care to share?” – or “Bring hither the finest tales of alternative universe adventure known to mankind!”

And you know what – he never recommended a dud. Not once. Every single time I asked him these questions he’d get a gleam in his eye, reach out to the shelves and snag a book, reel it in and present it to me with a wry “Read this?”

Almost always my answer would be “no” and from that humble beginning a new love affair with a new authors realms of imagination would be sparked – all due to Rog, his most excellent book store and his encyclopedic knowledge of sci-fi and fantasy books.

Rog also published many, many local authors and broke some really good writers into the big time. He edited anthologies and still to this day helps run the Birmingham Sci-Fi group.

Now then: a couple of years ago Andromeda Bookshop closed down; I think that the steadily increasing rents in Birmingham city centre finally got to them. This is a genuine shame for anyone in the Peoples Republic that is into books and enjoys buying from smaller, independent stores as it keeps the money locally. Also it means that Rog’s income plummeted.

So I am going to unashamedly, 100% recommend that you go to Rog’s online Ebay shop and buy whatever he is recommending this week. The man is an utter genius when it comes to digging out quality books for fans of the genre and he has made a huge contribution to science fiction and fantasy; the guy deserves a little hand – so if all it takes is to buy your books from HIS shop at Amazon instead of elsewhere then lets get on with it.

In addition to making solar panel roofs compulsory the government should pass legislation that forces people to use rainwater to flush their toilets – with one added extra.

All such tanks have a 10 or 20% reserve capacity for absorbing abnormal rainwater and alleviating floods. Normally when the tank gets to 80% excess water is let go; there is always a small reserve kept for times of emergencies. Then when there is a LOT of rain someone can flip a switch that remotely activates all of the emergency capacity in the rainwater collection systems of a given area and they start to fill their excess capacity.

So; suddenly in a given area all rainwater that falls onto a roof is held in a tank. I don’t know the figures but that has GOT to have an impact on flooding! – as well as helping out with water usage in general as suddenly no toilet is flushed with water from the mains but only with rain water.

The secret here is large tanks: dig up the garden and bury a huge mother of a tank; then use a small wind turbine to pump the water to where it is needed. Personally – as long as there was a small filter there – I would have no problem bathing in rainwater. It is a LOT more pure now than it waswith acid rain!

But as ever the free market would never do this because it requires captial expenditure to provide a small but long term benefit to the individual – as well as a long term benefit to society as a whole. So; make it compulsory and get a huge swathe of people employed in implementing it and make it possible to retrofit them with an interest free loan and a grant for 50% of the cost – and make it compulsory for all new roofs to have them in say 5 years time.