Bacon Butty piles on to one of the notions I criticised here. Food miles are, if anything, less useful than embodied energy as a policy target – after all, a whacking 22 per cent of CO2 attributed to UK food transport originates from sea and air transport. Obviously, the first place to start, especially as…
Read More More silly metricsAll you need to know about Gordon Brown is contained in this story in the Financial Times. Specifically, this response to criticism of his decision to fund the 2% tax cut for basic rate income tax payers by extending the basic rate downwards: The Conservatives argue, of course, that the complex set of income tax…
Read More Gordon Brown: no betterOn Newsnight last night, Blairite fatster Sion Simon MP demonstrated that he is too stupid to be trusted with glue. And Jeremy Paxman demonstrated that he no longer has any credibility, but we’ll get to that later. Well, let’s deal with the fool before the knave. Simon was on the show to defend the government…
Read More Sion Simon: Ignorant.Evolution appears to accelerate over time, and new scientific evidence suggests this is due to bacteria exchanging genes – but not within their own species, but horizontally, between groups. Thus, the total rate at which genetic information is exchanged can be faster than that provided by sexual reproduction and random mutations alone. Horizontal information exchange…
Read More What links these links?In Louisiana, they’re rebuilding old oil rigs as platforms for an offshore wind farm. This is about the coolest thing I’ve heard in years. When do we start doing this in the North Sea? It’s not like we haven’t got enough dead shipyards. On a related issue, Lotus seems to be enjoying a new flush…
Read More Oilrigs to turbinesDoes the idea of “embodied energy” convey any useful information whatsoever in the vast majority of its applications? I ask because I recently read about the difficulties faced in calculating this metric. For the uninitiated, it means the energy consumed in creating one unit of product X. People concerned about climate change and the supply…
Read More Useless metric of the decadeWell, I haven’t read the IPCC report yet, but I can report that I got my hands on an advance copy of Tim Worstall’s reaction to it. Here goes: Those scientist chappies are awfully clever. But what about this tangential issue? Here’s what the MSM isn’t telling you: if you make entirely different assumptions that…
Read More IPCC: First ReactionIt’s been little reported anywhere that the appointment of Admiral Fallon as CINCCENTCOM has been matched by the Iraqi Government. They have, over US objections, chosen as commandant of Baghdad an officer who used to be..a sailor. Does this mean war with Iran is imminent? Meanwhile, I think the blogospheric Iran-talk is getting to me.…
Read More Iraqi Command Shift Signals Attack on IranWhy, asks Chris Dillow, do we consider Milton Friedman a man of the Right? Dillow was thinking of such things as the earned-income tax credit and his opposition to conscription, but the question requires some unpacking. I don’t believe, for example, that his concern with liberty is incompatible with the Left. Neither is it impossible…
Read More Friedman: a man of two halvesThere seems to be an increasing belief around that we’re still in Iraq because the UK/USA leaders can’t bring themselves to book a loss, as Ezra Klein puts it over at Tapped. David Kurtz at TPM argues similarly that Bush thinks the only way the US can be defeated is if it chooses to leave…
Read More Enron and Iraq