Labour: where can it go from here?

Labourology seems to be the rule at the moment. This excellent piece by Alex Wilcock is particularly pointed. "They won’t listen to your complaints. They won’t listen to your concerns. Now they’re telling you to clear off if you don’t agree with everything they ever do." Their sense of frustration is palpable. 12 years of Labour! Surely everything should be all right by now?

Speaking to Labour activists on occasion, what is most remarkable is this disconnect between what they percieve the Labour Party as being about, and what the government does. However much some of them disagree with the government, the Labour Party still has some hidden magical essence that is different. Total cobblers of course. The best way to judge the party is by what it does in government. That is what defines it. The rest is comfort food.

The 50p rate signals the end of the Blair project, which was to get the party to shut up about what it believed in, because that was largely wrong, and adopt a centrist position, or conservative or neo-con as necessary, to be elected and achieve the core agenda of pushing through big public spending, much of which has done some good, albeit inefficiently.

The problem with this was not where the party was moving away from, but where it was moving to. Labour instincts of opposing the bosses and capitalists at every turn had to be suppressed, but there was no real debate of these new centrist/neo-con values. Loyalty matters more than debate anyway. So now the project is ending the unresolved conflict re-emerges: between the moral superiority of socialism and the practical necessity of rejecting socialism. This is a dead debate, but I don't think the Labour Party knows how to have any other. It knows no other values by which it might criticise the rights and wrongs of a policy, but socialist values, and it knows it cannot trust itself to speak these values.

So when a party/government has a culture of a) no debate, or b) if there must be debate, a futile left-right one, it should be no surprise that it cannot listen, that it must become out of touch. Just as the Tories ignored all the sane advice on the mess they were making of railway privatisation, Labour cannot understand the mess of the tax credits system. Political good intentions trump any constructive criticism. And if a policy is wrong because it is illiberal, the same applies. They have put their values away because they are left wing and so can't be trusted.

And this value-free, debate-free politics leads naturally to the cult of managerialism. We know how to run public services, they said. But they didn't. Chris Dillow's book The End of Politics is good on this, where I have dipped into it.

So we have an autocratic value-free government/party incapable of listening, and that is enough - any such party would have to go badly wrong sooner or later. But that's only half the problem. They've also run out of money. In 1999 Gordon Brown was crowing about how he'd fixed the structural budget deficit that the Tories had left. But even before the financial crisis, the golden rule had gone and prudence was dead. Having no money means that New Labour deal - switch off your values and we will give you big public spending - can no longer work. So the party will descend into infighting as both sides renege. 

12 years. Where did it all go wrong? The New Labour deal - you can't have socialism, but you can have a bigger state - could only last so long. The working class may have been abandoned, but I don't think the class struggle mentality, or the Hegelian dialectic was. So centrist/neo-con Labour needed enemies and scapegoats as much as Old Labour did. But I suggest most of the problems our society faces are organic, spontaneous, not the result of a clash of interests, and so top-down confrontational answers do not work.

Even a party starting from a good place, which made a virtue of loyalty over debate, would inevitably go wrong over time. Add to that a belief in top-down micromanagement from a position of ignorance; an internal compromise that demands ever-ballooning state spending; adherence to some of the philosophical errors underpinning socialism, if not socialism itself; preference for a value-free attitude to business, rather than admitting your values were wrong; having no regard for liberalism; willingess to go to war on a lie;... etc, etc.

Frankly, it is amazing that things are not already much much worse than they are. Where should Labour go? What should it change? Or is the question: what on earth should it keep the same?

Emote with me!!!

I've been meaning to say this for a while - since attending the Social Liberal Forum meeting at the last Lib Dem conference. But it ties in nicely with Charlotte's revelation about the nature of the "progressive" and conservative debate, and how each side thinks they are doing what is right.

Speaker after speaker at the social liberal forum said how deeply they cared about the plight of underprivileged people, so much that the mood of the event could be described as a collective subvocal chant of emote with us! Having been a churchgoer (charismatic) in the past, and therefore having done that sort of thing in another context, I am deeply suspicious of it. It doesn't work for me. Yet these are important emotions to have. Empathy for the poor is better than contempt. It is still only a pale caricature of what the left - the Labour movement - was meant to be about, which was working people asserting themselves, not, as it is now, working people being patronised by the middle classes. I would attribute much of the BNP success to the way that where Labour seem to say "We care about you", the BNP say "We care about us."

But back to the Forum. A speaker goes "We care. We care. We care. 50p tax rate!" to a cheer. I can see how that policy absolutely feels right to people, but I am still left wanting the analysis that it would do any good. "It's a symbol" we are told, as if that were a good thing.

But of course it is not just the left that emotes like this. Only when Conservatives do it, it is something way nastier. Europe: boo. Foreigners: boo. Single parents: boo. I remember the Conservative election broadcasts in the 80s pushing the fear button over nuclear disarmament. Fear leads to hate and hate leads to the dark side. Conservative emoting is all dark side of the force stuff.

Charlotte points out that Conservatives believe they are doing the right thing, and I would agree for the most part. But lets not slip into relativism here - just because people disagree over what the right thing is, it doesn't mean there is nothing to be said about it. Charlotte is right that politics would be better if it were more rational, but rationality alone doesn't give us values. Libertarians of the Ayn Rand school like to portray themselves as driven purely by reason, but this is based on sophistry, and Rand had no answer to David Hume's is-ought gap.

I've written before about the 2 or 5 foundations of morality in evolutionary psychology. These 5 instinctive traits do exist in us, and we can apply reason to ask the question: what are the consequences if we reinforce this instinct or suppress that one in the language that we use - the metaphors we choose - the buttons that we push - to explore and advance our political ideas.

So liberalism as I see it involves a recognition that promoting the wrong foundations - the deference to authority for example, or the ingroup (class/race/etc) - has bad consequences, and promoting the right foundations - reciprocity, no harm, etc, has good consequences. This relies on an assessment of the consequences of freedom or tyranny, class war or class peace, etc. Is this or that a consequence that I want? How do I feel about it? It is an emotional question.

Ways to Save the Planet 3

We've reached the end of the series with two more ideas for fighting global warming.

First up, solar panels on satellites. The idea being that there is twice as much light up there as down here, and, if concentrated by fresnel lenses, many times more. Then the energy would be transmitted back to earth by microwaves, SimCity style.

This episode left many obvious questions unasked and unanswered:

1. How effficient is this microwave transmission of energy? Get twice as much energy from your solar panel, and lose half on the way down, and you haven't gained anything by being in space.

2. How many solar panels could we have on land for the price of putting one in orbit? My guess would be a number in three figures. Maybe less if you have to buy the land, but this world - even much of the West - is hardly short of deserts.

3. Launching objects into space is highly energy intensive, as is any subsequent maintenance. So what is the embedded carbon cost of one of these satellites? Compare this to a similar device, on land, albeit generating half the power, during daylight. It can't be good. How long will it have to last?

Of course you don't get answers to "how long will it last" while the whole project is at a mere proof of concept stage. But it seems to me very hard for these numbers to add up.

Finally we had a design for an active scrubber of CO₂ from the atmosphere. Air blown into the device at one end would flow against a caustic soda solution, reacting with it, removing the carbon dioxide.

True to form, much was made of building the prototype - welding the blades on to the fan, setting the thing up in a football stadium, and staying up all night to see if the numbers - on the stadium scoreboard - indicated success, which they did. Success was defined as extracting more CO₂ than is generated by the energy required to run the thing. A modest goal and clearly not the limit of ambition for efficiency.

What was less clear was how it could possibly be more efficient to extract CO₂ from the air, where it is sparse, rather than from the exhausts of power stations where it is abundant. My understanding of CCS technology, such as it exists, is that it substantially diminishes the fuel efficiency of the plant, because the CCS process takes a lot of energy to run. Extracting CO₂ from a lower concentration in air, the energy cost is surely even bigger.

The other issue ignored by the programme was where we get all this caustic soda (NaOH) from. All the machine is doing is stirring the reagents in this reaction:

CO₂ + NaOH -> NaHCO₃

Now - we are not told - the caustic soda can be reclaimed from the sodium bicarbonate by reacting with lime (CaO).

NaHCO₃ + CaO -> NaOH + CaCO₃ 

What's that we've got now - CaCO₃ - calcium carbonate (calcite/chalk). OK , the lime can be retrieved from this for reuse and the CO₂ extracted for storage, by heating to 825 degrees C. 

 CaCO₃ + heat -> CaO +  CO₂ 

Whew. But hang on there's a lot of processing here. A lot of energy, surely, required to heat the calcium carbonate, to compete the cycle. This sort of chemical cycle necessarily requires an energy input, even though the outputs are identical to the inputs. We are just using chemistry to move CO₂ from A to B. And this, presumably, is why CCS has a high energy cost.

Finally, there is the issue of whether and how CO₂  can be safely stored. This being the Discovery channel, the idea they tested was fabricating torpedos out of raw solid CO₂ - dry ice - and dropping them into the ocean where they would embed themselves in the sediment of the ocean floor and stay there for a good long time. In theory. So we have a delivery mechanism that is cool and probably works, but nobody checked whether the CO₂ actually stays put. There wasn't even a picture of the torpedo hitting the ocean floor. It wouldn't be difficult to drop a number of these torpedos, and then to dive down and dig one up every month and see how much it has shrunk. Actually it would be difficult and expensive, but it is the critical question. 

And even if it works, this is another energy intensive step in the process. It is the whole process that has to cover its whole footprint, preferably many times over, not just one step or another.

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So where does this leave us? From the whole series I quite liked the wave powered pumps - although they may end up doing more for fish stocks than for global warming. But eating more fish may free up land for biofuels or renewables, so that could work. And I liked the cloud albedo management idea. The rest seemed just too weak. They stack up very poorly against existing renewable technologies, transport options, nuclear power, best energy efficiency practise and so on.

Maybe some of these ideas will come good. Further research should be encouraged, but banking on any would be madness. Our policies today should be based on technology that already exists.

Ways to Save the Planet 2 - if it isn't beneath you

We've had two more episodes of the series Ways to Save the Planet, that I discussed earlier. And, surprisingly topical for once, the Greens' spring conference has unanimously passed a motion condemning geo-engineering.

For the full text see page 30 of this pdf, but I will bring you some edited highlights.

Ocean-fertilisation poses an unknown but potentially serious threat to marine biodiversity, which plays an essential role in regulating the global carbon cycle, as well as putting fishing communities at risk.

Pity they didn't see episode 1 of Ways to Save the Planet which fertilised the top layer of ocean with deep water nutrients, causing a previously empty bit of ocean to fill with life.  Remember that much of the Pacific is desert-like already in its lack of biodiversity. These wave-powered pumps, if they work in earnest, are a means to greatly increase biodiversity. It deserves better than knee-jerk opposition. There's more...

Climate geo-engineering by increasing the earth’s albedo poses a major and unknown new threat to the climate system, to biodiversity and to people.

Er, how do you know the threat is major, if it is also unknown? We have a major and known threat of global warming, and that means - why do I feel like I am talking to a 4 year old here - it would be good to have a controllable system for global cooling.

Sure, the future is unpredictable if we control the amount of cloud cover or its reflectivity to manage the global temperature. But here is the thing. The future is unpredicable full stop. And it is rather more predicatable if we deal with global warming than if we don't.

So, as I was saying, two new episodes. The first was about a design for a tethered high altitude helium balloon wind turbine. Strictly this is renewable energy rather than geo-engineering, but the ends are much the same. They built a scaled down prototype which worked after a fashion. It would take a full size prototype to test whether such a turbine would have the output predicted. If so, 9.5 million of them could generate all the world's electricity. They would need 2500 times the global annual production of helium, which might be an issue. 

In the same niche, there's a video on TED, suggesting kites can be used to generate power.

The second new episode was on increasing the reflectivity of clouds - stratocumulus over oceans - by spraying micron-size droplets of sea water at them. As usual there were some problems. First they insisted on unmanned radio-controlled low carbon boats to deploy the equipment, and so went for the somewhat oddball Flettner rotor propulsion system. Plenty to build and test there, and it worked surprisingly well. It's not clear how much power the rotors would need, or where it would come from. There were solar panels on the CGI ships, which wouldn't be much good under cloud - but then if it is cloudy, the ship is already in the right place, right?

There was less success actually making the droplets small enough, but you can't have everything.

But what I thought was most telling about this episode was the objections. At the end of each episode a handful of experts - presumably - in lab coats are asked why the proposal is a bad idea or wouldn't work. Usually, they have given sound objections. 16 trillion lenses in space, are you kidding? But this time, they were stuck. All they had was vague objections to the principle of geo-engineering, much like the stuff from the Greens. But unlike blankets on icecaps, robot ships could be turned off at the first sign of trouble.

Unlike, indeed, a massive tree-planting operation, if that is done for geo-engineering purposes. Come on people, show some sense of perspective. I know you can hug a tree more easily than a robot ship, but that is no guide to how best to save the planet.

Ways to Save the Planet

Is there anything we can do to combat global warming other than reduce greenhouse gases? Actions which seek to cool the planet down directly, or sequester carbon from the atmosphere come under the heading geo-engineering. The little bolds and I have been following a series on the Discovery channel on this subject, called Ways to Save the Planet.

There are three basic responses to geo-engineering ideas:

1. Noooooo. Mucking about with the planet got us into this mess.

2. Aaaahhhhh. You see all we need is a little ingenuity, and everything will be back to normal. Global warming will be solved, if it is even happening at all anyway, which I doubt.

3. OK, will that work then?

I am firmly in camp number three. There is no reason in principle to reject geo-engineering. The planet is not God, and if it decides to kill us we are entitled to disagree and fight back. Even if global warming were halted by reduction in greenhouse gas emissions alone, we would probably need geo-engineering technology sooner or later anyway - nature has the power to turn nasty without our help. But any project has some enormous hurdles - that the earth is basically very very big, and any solution has to do an awful lot, and without using monumental amounts of energy.

There have been 4 episodes so far, all, unfortunately a little underwhelming. They follow the usual Discovery channel formula of injecting tension by having some mechanical thing go wrong, or threaten to do so, to dramatic background music and interviews with anxious engineers. Gripping.

And what were the ideas? A wave-powered pump bringing nutrient rich deep ocean water closer to the surface. Dangerous mucking about with the ecosystem? Not really - much of the Pacific is like the Sahara desert. Deep water nutrients would make an oasis - they would create an ecosystem where there is currently next to nothing. Greater plankton growth would mean faster carbon sequestration, and some of this carbon would find its way to the ocean floor for a reasonably long time.

Did it work? Briefly. But despite falling apart after a few hours, the location of the pump a week later was found teeming with life. So it looks like this idea could work. It's not going to do enough to change the nature of the challenge significantly, but can make some difference at a reasonable cost.

Next up covering the icecaps with reflective material to lower the albedo and thereby prevent melting and keep the earth's albedo lower. This one kinda puzzled me a bit. Surely you'll get more albedo bang for your buck covering something that isn't alraedy white. What I remember of the programme was an hour spent struggling with the practicalities of airlifting big rolls of white stuff to the arctic and unrolling it. Would it work? No idea.

Third was scattering the light from the sun with lenses in space. Discovery is in its comfort zone here with high tech lenses, rockets and so on. How many 60cm lenses are we going to need? 16 trillion! That's a whole lotta lenses. Well maybe if we make them 1 micron (0.001mm) thick, they'll be light enough that we can launch lots into space. Cue an hour of testing rockets and guns that might launch squillions of extremely fragile lenses without shaking them to bits. What fun. Did the rocket work? No. 

Clearly reducing the amount of light reaching the earth would reduce warming. A big lens in space - what could be simpler. But this idea involves a monumental space programme. How much, if it ever works at all, are 16,000,000,000,000 lenses going to cost to make and launch? Keep thinking, and lets not bank on this one.

Fourth was planting large numbers of trees by dropping seeds from an aircraft. Take a tree seed, in a lump of compost, wrap in a layer of wax, hard enough to break the ground surface, but which shatters on impact so doesn't impede the growth of the tree. Take 1000 of these in a cargo net under a helicopter and drop from a height and speed calculated to give a good spread pattern.

Again this was great fun, because the experiments involved aircraft, and dropping things out of them. The methods were ingenious, but I couldn't help wonder if - given the work that must be put into sourcing the seeds and assembling the wax canisters, and round tripping the helicopter (it would still take hundreds of trips to seed a square kilometre), whether it might not be easier to hire a few people with spades to plant the trees properly.

So we get to the dramatic final test of the idea. Did the seeds bury themselves in the ground at the right depth and the right distance apart from each other? Yes. Did they actually grow? No. Why not? Er, maybe the soil pH was wrong. Sigh. And maybe the guy with the spade would have known that.

Well that's all we've had so far. There's another 4 episodes, to come, and I hope they plan to end on a high note with some more promising ideas. Some geo-engineering ideas can be double-edged. If you lower the earth's temperature by controlling light or albedo, you do nothing for acidification of the oceans. So if it turned out that global warming wasn't a preeminent threat to us after all and was in fact no more serious than ocean acidification, then we may have to modify our strategy with this in mind. Much geo-engineering is diplomatically problematic. Whatever the global effect, there are likely to be local effects, that the locals may not like. Nonetheless, I think a common cause would be good for our diplomatic relations.

Yet I suggest this all has little significance yet for policy. Potential geo-engineering projects are much like potential technologies to save or generate energy. Some will work one day, some won't; we don't know yet which is which. Meanwhile we should apply the technologies and policy options we have. We are hardly at risk of doing more to combat climate change than might later prove to be necessary.