The Smile Stayed With Him The Whole Day Long

*



A dense mass of azure towers thrust from the sloped foundations of the Benevolence relics, fluted and spiralled like the shells of fabulous sea creatures, agleam with gold and silver gilding. A haze of delicate latticed walkways and bridges wrapped itself around the towers of Ymir, with the longer spans reaching from finger to finger. The air spangled with the bright moving motes of vehicles and airborne people, buzzing from tower to tower.

Alastair Reynolds. House of Suns.




If there were memories, if we were chaos driven and not coming from some comfortable suburban alcove, then the sight of the two of them in the street might have touched us. Margie was a well known character in the area. She had a strange chomping motion about her mouth, a pudgy, battered in face, wore second hand clothes and presumably lived somewhere in the midst of the mound of pubic housing nearby. He was not satisfied. Her colour and movement, her story, was just another blimp on the landscape. They struggled to make meaning out of a heartless city, a place of teaming millions, their own stories.

but at the end of the day the traffic still flowed past ceaselessly; and no one could care if they came or went. He said as much to the neighbour who simply said: make waves, make the sun shine, join the crowd. No one would notice if I disappeared either, he said. The kids would. Not even them, he replied. Their mother says she's trained them so they won't notice if I disappear. They mght miss me for a few weeks; and that's it. That's how important we are. The city will fold itself over our snail trails and no one will even know we were here; that's how important we are.

This futility, this sense of unimportance, wasn't just impacting on them; the whole populace was beginning to feel as if they had been dismissed from class; while those who soar, Rudd, Obama, fly higher, become grander, take on measured accounts, dominate the airwaves. Smart suits, smart rhetoric, failed presidents, the pathos of loss, all of this was for another time, another group of personnel. He was shattered. He wanted to be a villager; to be head man or senior eccentric, to have a place in people's hearts.

But no head man could have such a sinking heart. No head man could look with such empathy upon the faces of the battered working classes, queuing defeated at the bus stop each morning, cold, miserable, a long hard day in front of them, their insistence on refuge denied them. The rich always think they deserved it; that all it takes is a bit of hard work and common sense. Persistence. And daddy's trust fund. And shallow hearts and ancient grievances. Cry out. Rescue us. Find dignity in labour. How could anyone be so cruel, so indifferent, to the yearnings of others?

Deeply humbled, they said, not meaning a word of it. Why don't all these wage salves and modern day captives just walk out? Why don't they say enough is enough, let's out. Let's celebrate in the shadows. Let's flee this indifferent place. But they gathered in clots at the bus stop each morning, shivering inside their coats at the early hour, the traffic streaming past down the road leading to the web of factories that made up the industrial suburbs nearby. Glamour, there wasn't an inch of it. They didn't even speak to each other, huddled inside their own misery, as they waited.

He couldn't stand it. He couldn't be sure there was an answer on the other side. But he saw Margie in the street holding hands with a man. He had never seen such a thing before. She had been a lone eccentric in the area for virtually as long as he could remember. The story was she drank, and one day drank one too many; Karsakov syndrome or some such name, and that oine additional drink was enough to turn her brain into
Swiss cheese; and she never came back. She barged into AA meetings around the area; disrupting everyone, shouting at invisible threats; and she was used as a warning by the older sage members; that's what happens if you have one too many, stop now.

He didn't care. He was touched by the sight of her holding hands with her new boyfriend; assuming he was as knocked off as she. And smiled as he ploughed on through the bitterly cold streets; passing group after group of the destined, the dying, the defeated. He looked again; and smiled; as they passed on up the street. And the smile stayed with him the whole day long.



THE BIGGER STORY:

http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/2738/252/

We hear a great deal about ‘dangerous climate change’ from the likes of Al Gore and Nicholas Stern. By contrast, I wish to speak about dangerous ‘Green’ economics.

We forget at our peril that a significant portion of the ‘Green’ movement has striven for over 40 years to undermine the whole of our economic system, and to replace it with a ‘Green’ autocracy that can rule all our lives and decisions. Unfortunately, until the present economic crisis, too many of our bien pensant classes, along with their preferred media, such as the BBC and the New York Times, have been happy to play along with this trope, paying lip service to it intellectually and at dinner parties, if not much in practice. The trope has been reinforced by a legion of sloppy-minded university products from far too many ill-conceived MAs and MScs in development studies and environmental studies.

These forces have worked hard to undermine the economic world by adopting three quite deliberate tactics.

Impossible Externalities

First, they have tried to usurp economic decision-making by inserting a zero, or an infinity, in cost benefits. In other words, they have raised the importance of non-market, often unmeasurable, externalities to the point where you are forced to ignore, or to destroy, market decisions. In doing this, they aim to remove the ability to choose anything other than their ‘Green’ choices.

As The Observer unwittingly illustrates so well today [‘Recycled waste could be stored on MoD bases. Sites are desperately being sought to house the UK’s unwanted mountain of recyclable rubbish’, The Observer, November 15, News, p. 5], a fine example of this is recycling in the UK. There has never been a real market for many ‘recycled’ items, so that much of the process has been driven by ‘moral’ fiat, but, even more significantly, by bureaucratic EU edict. Now that economic realities are biting hard, with collapsing demand for virtually all waste, recyclable or not, the unreality of all this is brutally exposed. As The Observer is forced to report:

“Huge waste mountains could be sited on military bases under emergency plans to protect Britain’s recycling revolution from the economic downturn.

Local authorities have requested government permission to site rubbish dumps on Ministry of Defence land in order to stockpile growing amounts of recyclable waste for which there is no use and no market.”

A moment’s analysis of this comment illustrates the bien pensant - and The Observer is the quintessential bien pensant newspaper - rubbish behind such ‘Green’ economics. The article admits that there is “no use” and “no market” for the waste, but we must still continue the “revolution”, whatever the costs. How can something be “recyclable” if it has no use and no market?

Other noteworthy examples of impossible externalities include a long list of highly dubious ‘ecosystem services’ (nearly always, of course, including trees).

Moreover, the artificiality of carbon trading is palpable, while, in the present economics of crisis, the price of carbon has inevitably plummeted.

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2008/11/022077.php

NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, run by global warming alarmist James Hansen, has been a chief source of "data" to support climate hysteria. Repeatedly, though, GISS data have been shown to be flawed, if not fraudulent. Now, it's happened again:

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

As the scientific evidence continues to accumulate, it becomes increasingly clear that "global warming" hysteria is based on a combination of bad science and fraud.

http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?7724a95d-54f2-403b-abab-db95e878d62a

What, then, might the true cost of an effective cap-and-trade system be?

This question was recently examined in a detailed analysis of the Lieberman-Warner “Climate Security Act” by the American Council for Capital Formation and the National Association of Manufacturers, which concluded as follows –

The CO2 emissions allowance price needed to reduce energy use to meet the Bill’s targets is estimated at $55 to $64 per metric ton of CO2 in 2020, rising to between $227 to $271 per ton in 2030.

The cost of the allowances raises energy prices for residential consumers by 26% to 36% in 2020, and 108% to 146% in 2030 for natural gas, and 28% to 33% in 2020, and 101% to 129% in 2030 for electricity. In short, a workable carbon trading scheme, even if it were necessary, could be expected to double the price of basic household energy.

These and other increased energy costs will slow the US economy (at today’s prices) by $151 billion to $210 billion in 2020 and $631 billion to $669 billion in 2030, causing job losses of between 1.2 million to 1.8 million in 2020 and 3 million to 4 million by 2030. If anything, these figures for job losses are conservative, since the calculation ignores any second-order or “knock-on” effects caused by the rapid and worldwide economic dislocation that “cap-and-trade” would cause.

As manufacturing slows, the value of shipments will fall by 3.2 % to 4% in 2020 under the low and high cost cases; by 2030 the value of shipments will fall by 8.3 % to 8.5% under the two cases. The higher energy costs, lower economic activity and fewer jobs will in turn reduce average household income (at today’s prices) by $739 to $2,927 in 2020 and by between $4,022 and $6,752 in 2030. Here too, the analysis is very much on the conservative side: for the sole consequence of the fatal self-inflicted wound of carbon trading on the economies of the free West will be to transfer manufacturing activity and the jobs that go with it from our own shores to China, where no cap-and-trade system will be put in place, and where the carbon dioxide emitted per unit of electricity generated is far higher than in the West, as is the concomitant particulate pollution. In short, the inevitable consequence of introducing a cap-and-trade system in the West will be to increase the world’s carbon emissions and its pollution, while pointlessly damaging our own economies.

The manufacturers’ analysis, like the “Report”, was performed using computer models, but coming to an opposite result, illustrating that the output of computer models is more likely to reflect the inclinations of their users than to reveal objective reality. If anything, however, the manufacturers’ analysis of the Lieberman-Warner Bill errs very much on the side of understating the true costs of cap-and-trade schemes: for the analysis optimistically assumes that nuclear power will be readily available (notwithstanding the considerable political resistance to it that persists); that carbon capture and storage will be practicable and affordable (though the workability and cost of this technology has not yet been demonstrated); that wind and biomass technologies will work (notwithstanding that no unsubsidized wind-farm is profitable, and that even the UN has now abandoned its earlier recommendation of biofuels because of their significant contribution to the recent, sudden doubling of world food prices); and that low-cost offsets against carbon emissions will be obtainable (though there is no evidence that they will be).

The manufacturers’ analysis also greatly underestimates the profound economic dislocation that will arise from the growing number of proposals to shut down up to 90% of the economies of the West. If any action were required to mitigate carbon dioxide emissions, over and above the inexorably-rising international prices that will mitigate them without the need for any governmental intervention, cap-and-trade would be one of the least efficient methods. Straightforward taxation of gasoline and of electricity would be far simpler.

Why, then, does the “Report” argue for the complex, costly, fraud-prone scheme that is cap-and-trade, rather than for simple, marginal-cost-free increases in energy taxes? The reason is purely political. Precisely because cap-and-trade is so complex, numerous middlemen are involved, each of whom will enrich himself at our expense. Also, energy-producing corporations that would oppose the increased taxation of their product can be persuaded to back cap-and-trade because the opportunities for fraud are so great that the corporations can devise ways of making very substantial profits, again at the expense of the ultimate user – you and me. Private-sector entities that would oppose additional taxation are being bribed, in effect, by the promise that if they ignore the scientific consensus to the effect that “global warming” will not be catastrophic (Schulte, 2008, op. cit.), they will be able to profit from the rigged market in licenses to emit.

The “Report” by the Environmental Defense Fund not only echoes the Stern Report in artificially overstating the climate consequences of anthropogenic influence on the atmosphere, but also in artificially understating the costs of mitigation and artificially evaluating future costs by the use of a discount rate well below that which commercial entities would use: it also makes the naïve and scientifically-unjustifiable assumption that if carbon-based fuels are made more expensive new technologies to produce energy more cheaply will certainly emerge to replace them.

Without this speculative assumption, the entire “Report” collapses. Though it is self-evident that as the price of gasoline and electricity rises the rewards for those able to find or develop alternative sources of energy will correspondingly increase, there is no guarantee that affordable or workable new technologies will emerge to replace the old.

By the same token, one may not definitively assume that the higher carbon-fuel prices that are inevitable regardless of cap-and-trade will not lead to the rapid emergence of new energy technologies capable of replacing fossil fuels as they run to exhaustion. However, the following difficulties in new technologies are apparent:

Wind farms produce very small amounts of electricity, at enormous landscape and environmental cost, particularly to large game birds and to bats killed by the apparently-slow-moving but in fact very fast-moving blades. The variability of the wind requires all rated capacities to be divided by 4-6. Wind farms produce not a milliwatt when the wind is not blowing strongly enough, so that fossil-fueled power stations have to be kept in steam at all times to take up the load when the wind drops. Also, wind farms are chiefly located a long way from where the power they generate is needed, requiring expensive and unsightly transmission lines and causing substantial transmission losses. Worst of all, the load variability caused by wind fluctuations destabilizes any electricity grid to which the wind farms supply power, so that they cannot safely contribute more than a small percentage of total power supply even when the wind is blowing.

Hydro-electric power is already almost as fully developed as it can be: there is little scope worldwide for very large increases in hydro-electric capacity. Hydro power has killed more people per kWh than almost any other form of power generation, largely through the failure of dams.

Wave-power is still in its infancy, but it is already apparent that building wave-power generating sets strong enough to cope with the severe weather at sea will continue to be a severe drawback. Wave-power requires still longer transmission lines than wind-power, since it is by definition an offshore technology: transmission losses, therefore, will be formidable.

Solar power continues to be beset by problems converting solar energy to electrical energy. Though solar cells are steadily improving their efficiency, they are only useful in sunny climates and on a micro-generation scale. Larger solar collectors built in deserts suffer from extremes of temperature, exposure to wind, and sandstorms. Maintenance costs are high; reliability is low; transmission losses are substantial.

Nuclear power, in the post-Chernobyl climate of irrational fear, will not make a comeback soon, though the UK Labor Government, originally implacably opposed, now recommends it. Unless fast-breeder reactors can be made to work, the world’s supply of usable uranium will be exhausted in about half a century, at about the same time as oil and gas. Attempts at nuclear fusion, both on the macro scale (tokamaks and tori) and on the micro scale (aneutronic fusion) have proven unsuccessful and little progress has been made after 40 years’ research.

Biofuels, once recommended by the “global warming” alarmists, have disastrously doubled the price of staple foods and of agricultural land worldwide, and are already causing millions to starve. Also, it has now been calculated that the carbon emissions from the production and consumption of most biofuels is actually greater than that of gasoline, underlying not only the senselessness of biofuels but the need for governments to develop and enact science-based policies free from interference by scientifically-illiterate pressure-groups.

Hydrogen fuel cells are unreliable, expensive to produce and to maintain, and subject to a series of so-far-incurable scientific drawbacks that limit their usefulness.

Electric vehicles are slower than conventional vehicles, have a shorter range, and cause carbon emissions not significantly less than conventional vehicles, because the power that charges them comes from conventional power stations.

It is always possible to imagine entirely new space-age, high-tech solutions that might spring us free from dependency upon carbon-based fuels. However, it is naïve to assume, as the “Report” does, that such solutions will inevitably arise merely because cap-and-trade will increase still further the price of carbon fuels that are becoming daily more expensive in any event.

The danger in making such a naively hopeful assumption is that, if we destroy our own economies in the hope that some scientific deus ex machina will save us at the last moment, the lights will begin to go out all over the West – and soon.

Conclusion

If carbon trading works, it will not be cheap. If it is cheap, it will not work. Either way, it is unnecessary, both because “global warming” will not prove catastrophic and because the prices of carbon-based fuels are already rising on their own without State interference. It would accordingly be false to suggest that the cost of cap-and-trade to the economy – whether financially or in terms of jobs, household consumption, and growth – will be “minimal”.

Most proponents of cap-and-trade have a vested and often financial direct interest in taking advantage of their privileged positions to create and then to exploit a rigged market, where the State will ration the volume of emissions that may be traded and will, therefore, largely dictate the price, whether directly (as in the dirigiste EU), or indirectly. It is at best disingenuous to pretend that the cost to the victims of this or any rigged market will be negligible.

Likewise, the artful notion that some of the additional revenues contributed to governmental coffers by the victims of carbon trading can be redeployed to alleviate the worst of its ill effects on the poorest households is, in economic terms, absurd. For most households are poor: therefore, State subsidies to minimize the cost to the poorest households of the carbon trading that so greatly enriches those who rig and control the false market in hot air will also minimize what little environmental benefit might be expected from the scheme.

Above all, the self-inflicted economic wound of making the use of carbon fuels more expensive in the free West than in Communist China will merely transfer carbon emissions and jobs to the corrupt, polluting regime that already has the worst environmental record in the world, and will deploy the profits towards the continued expansion of its own network of uniquely dirty, coal-fired power stations, to the detriment of its own already-brutalized people, and to that of the environment, without any benefit to the climate whatsoever. Seen in this light, carbon trading – like biofuels before it – is lunacy.

The lunacy is culpable. For there is a moral dimension. It is inhumane and cruel carelessly or callously to inflict upon the poorest in the nation a policy – however currently fashionable – that is not justified by any “climate crisis”, that would not have any effect on the climate even if there were a “crisis”, that would cost the poorest households their current right to affordable electrical power and transportation while at the same time transferring overseas the jobs upon which our working people depend for their livelihoods, and that is calculated – and perhaps even intended – to enrich the enemies of freedom among the international community while actually increasing the global carbon emissions that it was nominally intended to reduce. Carbon trading is not merely futile – it is immoral, for it cannot but do harm to the poorest people in our community: the very people who are most deserving of our protection.