UK Gas supply- Capitalists fuck up, everyone sufers

[potential]

Yep, lignite has to be washed with solvents, and even then the exhaust has to be chemically "scrubbed" because it contains so much shit, so on top of everything else they have to dispose of "scrubbing" chemicals full of sequestrated nasties.

Even opencast anthracite is horrendously inefficiently produced, but its' "saving grace" as far as "the markets" are concerned is that its' production isn't labour-intensive and the workforce doesn't have to be anywhere near as skilled (and hence highly paid) as the workforce in deep pits.

exactly but coal fired power stations buy it by the tanker-load
because its cheaper, all the power companys ditched the buy
british coal about 10 years back. would be great news for britian
and not just the power generating companies.
I and thousands marched in support
of the miners but britian was gripped in a share owning state
sold off cheaply by the tories... i realy dont know what the
answer will be but there will be a statement by new labour
next week, nuclear power ????

in a share owning state

 

[Dhimmi]

FFF nail on head. A great example of the free market not being the best way to handle things.

 

[tom k&e]

Of course centrally planned economies never cause shortages

 

[poet]

We're running out of an inherently scarce resource. Shock horror. If there are viable reserves rattling about you can bet your arse someone is going to be supplying it in time for the massive price spike that would be caused by a real shortage. If there isn't then it's the consumer's fault (that's you and me) for using too much. You can't blame 'corporations' for everything like there's some disconnect, like they are some magical entity apart from us all. If a corporation does something it is because they have been paid by a consumer to do it. I blame all you hypocritical bastards still using fossil fuels. I have been 100% carbon neutral for years now and renewably generate many kilowatts more power than I use. If you haven't switched to npower juice or some other renewable electricity supplier then get off this thread and do it you lazy bastard - it takes all of fifteen minutes. If you own a fossil-burning car, use gas central heating or any of a catalogue of things then there is no dialogue I can have with you, as any ecological objection you may have to a free market inevitably boils down to your inability to act morally without being forced to do so.

As tom says, of course no-one went cold or hungry in any of the planned economies. Things like a town having hundreds of thousands of surplus lightbulbs and doorknobs but chronic food shortages never happened. Oh no. The free market isn't several factors more efficient at preventing real shortages than the most efficient planned economies, that's just capitalist propaganda.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Vulnerability begins with dependence. A planned economy and a capitalist economy both put your food security and energy supplies beyond your immediate control. You have to depend on people with other priorities, who are not necessarily going to act in your interest, but who certainly gain power and profit from your vulnerability. They may be completely incompetent, or they may be out to exploit you for profit. Either way, they aren't going to reliably act in your best interest.

The most efficient and reliable way to provide both food and energy security is to make your community sustainable at a local level. This is not beyond the reach of our society right now.

It isn't in the interests of governments or corporations for you to have this level of community security, because it allows you to tell them to fuck off.

 

[jayeola]

Um, yeah. I can just imagine the Mail's headline... "How go grow your own food, make your own energy"... "how I told BP to get lost, by A.N. Other - Surbiton"

 

[rhod]

There are enough reserves under NW Russia to supply Europe for hundreds of years. I believe a pipeline is to be built if the money's good.

So that'll be another region that we'll be dependent on for our energy. Let's hope relations remain cordial. I mean, nothing much can happen there in 40 or 50 years, can it?

I'm with Bernie on this. Energy conservation has to be the only rational way forward. For starters, force these bloody housebuilders to incorporate the very best standards of insulation, solar panels etc.

 

[atitlan]

We're running out of an inherently scarce resource. Shock horror. If there are viable reserves rattling about you can bet your arse someone is going to be supplying it in time for the massive price spike that would be caused by a real shortage. If there isn't then it's the consumer's fault (that's you and me) for using too much. You can't blame 'corporations' for everything like there's some disconnect, like they are some magical entity apart from us all. If a corporation does something it is because they have been paid by a consumer to do it.

That really isn't the point. No-one expects corporations to be anything other than the short-termist profiteering corporate bastards they've always been.

The issue is about the role of government in creating the environment in which they operate. The alternatives are out there and are viable to varying degrees and for different people.

Where government is completely abdicating it responsibility to the individuals who elected them is that they refuse to consider anything that conflicts with the corporate lobbying of companies that are powerful today.

The points about localised resources and imposition of stringent building regulations are two prime examples.


No matter how you set up a society businessmen will find ways to make money - change the rules of the business environment and some will fail while others will prosper. Do we really want to prop up profligate, socially irresponsible and polluting corporations to protect their interests over those who could flourish in a more environment and people friendly framework?

 

[kasheem]

Someone recently told me how frustrated he is that we are burning resources like oil, which is actually incredibly rare in this universe, as there is a lot you can do with it. Short term thinking indeed.

Yeah we should have gone fully nuclear 20 years ago. Now Blair is talking about it but it's already almost too late.

I wonder if Hugo Chavez is going to offer us a deal like he offered the Massachussetts government just the other day (40% off 'market' price).

 

[Bernie Gunther]

The advantages of nuclear power have been greatly exaggerated by PR people and the nuclear industry. It's only barely got a postive energy balance, if you do the sums honestly, and supplies of usable fuel are strictly limited.

See e.g. Nuclear Power Primer

 

[tom k&e]

The advantages of nuclear power have been greatly exaggerated by PR people and the nuclear industry. It's only barely got a postive energy balance, if you do the sums honestly, and supplies of usable fuel are strictly limited.

See e.g. Nuclear Power Primer

Breeder reactors

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Breeder reactors

Do you have an example of one proving useful? (for anything other than nuclear weapons proliferation I mean)

 

[tom k&e]

Do you have an example of one proving useful? (for anything other than nuclear weapons proliferation I mean)

Well if we nuked the north, there'd no longer be a shortage, cos we'd have reduced demand. Duh.

 

[poet]

That really isn't the point. No-one expects corporations to be anything other than the short-termist profiteering corporate bastards they've always been.

No, the point is that you're still talking about corporations as if they're seperate and distinct entities from the shareholders, customers and employees that make them work, which they aren't. Corporate greed merely reflects the greed of the millions, billions of individuals that enable that corporation and make greed profitable. Tescos screw over farmers not because they take some perverse joy in it but because their customers demand it. The reality is that most people care about how much farmers get paid but not enough to spend a few quid more to buy from a farmer's market. Tesco dominate retail for a fucking good reason - they do what the public want them to do, namely supply cheap groceries at any cost.

If your argument is that people are incapable of making good decisions unless they're forced to by some intellectual elite then it makes sense, but I'll fight against your cause with every ounce of strength in me. If your argument is that corporations are just these things that do what they want regardless of what their customers demand then you just fundamentally misunderstand the most basic principles of economics.

I don't prop up these corporations, you do - I just support their right to exist.

 

[bugsy7]

Breeder reactors

Right! Only everybody's backed away from them (even to the extent of the Frogs abandoning one midway through construction in the early 90s) because they can't get them to work properly.
Kalkar (the only fast breeder successfully constructed in Germany) didn't even manage to get on the net before it, too, was abandoned.
One of the main problems is the highly voaltile coolant used, but nobody to date has come up with a better solution (excuse the pun).

MsG

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I think it's a mistake to make the complicity of the average citizen in the corporate food and energy chain a moral issue. In my view it mostly comes down to the financial and/or time cost of acting sustainably and the lack of sustainable alternatives that are realistically available to the average citizen.

Sustainable alternatives that might seem very accessible to a high-earning professional aren't nearly as accessible to a single mum on benefits. Sure, there are some marginal things that one can do, varying more or less depending on where you live and what your job is, but real sustainability requires a substantial investment and is feasible only for a prosperous few.

It becomes accessible to the masses only through mass action to bring it about and the appropriation of the significant resources required to support genuinely sustainable communities. It implies radically changed priorities, it implies land reform, it implies significant changes in municipal planning.

Those kinds of changes, in my view, requires concerted political action at a local level. I doubt that it will come about on a mass scale until we've had one or more really nasty shocks, in terms of food and/or energy security. I do think it will eventually become possible to make that transition however.

We simply cannot afford to allow the present situation to continue fucking up our long term food and energy security.

 

[atitlan]

No, the point is that you're still talking about corporations as if they're seperate and distinct entities from the shareholders, customers and employees that make them work, which they aren't..

Yes they are. Group behaviour is always different from the individuals that make up the group. This is even more marked when you add in the distorting factor of heirarchies, which lessens or removes the influence of most of the group.

Your argument also totally ignores the fact that the pressure of day-to-day living will make people take decisions that conflict with their ideals. That is why it is incumbant on givernment to reflect the ideals that people have in regard to society and the environment when shaping policy that affects the business environment. As I said before, for government to allow the market to determine its own operating environment is an abdication of responsibility.

In the case of Tesco they screw both the farmers and the customer - the truth of corporate greed is written in the mark-up.

 

[poet]

Sustainable alternatives that might seem very accessible to a high-earning professional aren't nearly as accessible to a single mum on benefits.

Poor people aren't the problem as I'll explain in a minute, but... Npower juice is as cheap as any other electricity supplier. Buying vegetables locally is cheaper than pre-packed supermarket veg, veganism is certainly the cheapest way to eat. Bikes and bus passes are miles cheaper than running a car. Growing your own food was in some dim and distant past a means for poor people to eat for free rather than a middle-class hobby. Granted if you don't know about options then they aren't open to you, but surely that's the fault of all the so-called grassroots activists who seem to be so numerous around here.

Most poor people consume reasonable amounts anyway as a matter of neccesity - the real problem is the comfortably well off, people who can afford to run a large car and take a couple of flights a year, people who don't think about whether the heating is on or not, people who think nothing of throwing out functional belongings for reasons of whim and fashion. The poor cannot afford to be wasteful and so for the most part aren't. Far sooner than we think the market will start making alt-power the cheap alternative as shortages and economies of scale tip the balance in it's favour.

 

[citydreams]

I don't prop up these corporations, you do - I just support their right to exist.

You participate in a political environment whereby market forces allow whoever has the most money (power) to take control of common utilities.

It is all very well being morally righteous as an individual but a collective response is needed as the OP points out.

And to claim that a corporation acts in the consumers interest is just as valid as saying we live under perfect competition and general equilibrium - wishful thinking.

Natural resources belong to this world as a whole. They need to be shared accordingly.

 

[Pickman's model]

Natural resources belong to this world as a whole. They need to be shared accordingly.

could you expand on that, please?

do you think that san marino and liechtenstein should get fuck all resources and china and india should have about 66% between them? or that russia and canada and china should have the bulk? how would you propose they were shared out?

 

[citydreams]

how would you propose they were shared out?

I expect that the world's resources could be quantified very much like the price models under communist russia using more updated mathematical methods and allowing for sustainability.

It would then be a case of giving each world citizen an equal percentage of this number as a trading currency and allowing the citizen to spend it via a market distribution very much in the way that carbon taxes are traded at the moment.

 

[citydreams]

<waits for tom_K&E to see the word communist in glee>

 

[Bernie Gunther]

I'm sceptical about any central planning model being able to help much with sustainability. Any proposed planning system can only model or control something to the extent that it has sufficient internal variety to represent it.

Central planning systems by their nature lack the variety that is to be found in highly decentralised systems doing their optimisation based on local conditions. Decentralised systems based on local control are also inherently far more responsive to changing conditions and hence better able to react.

See e.g. http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/REQVAR.html

Finally, centralised systems are more susceptible to lobbying by large organisations and special interests, because control is vested in a few individual who can more easily be got at.

 

[citydreams]

Any proposed planning system can only model or control something to the extent that it has sufficient internal variety to represent it..

I don't understand this. What makes you think that there isn't enough internal variety to allow the model I outlined?

How are you suggesting that natural resources are distributed?

 

[Giles]

Vulnerability begins with dependence. A planned economy and a capitalist economy both put your food security and energy supplies beyond your immediate control. You have to depend on people with other priorities, who are not necessarily going to act in your interest, but who certainly gain power and profit from your vulnerability. They may be completely incompetent, or they may be out to exploit you for profit. Either way, they aren't going to reliably act in your best interest.

The most efficient and reliable way to provide both food and energy security is to make your community sustainable at a local level. This is not beyond the reach of our society right now.

It isn't in the interests of governments or corporations for you to have this level of community security, because it allows you to tell them to fuck off.

Do you actually think that there is a conspiracy against people becoming self-sufficient in a variety of ways, because they would then no longer "need" the centralised state? That sounds a bit conspiraloon to me.....

Most people don't *want* to live in self-sufficient enclaves so they can tell everyone else to fuck off, do they?

Only hard-line greens mixed with survivalists, surely?

Giles..

 

[poet]

I expect that the world's resources could be quantified very much like the price models under communist russia using more updated mathematical methods and allowing for sustainability.

It would then be a case of giving each world citizen an equal percentage of this number as a trading currency and allowing the citizen to spend it via a market distribution very much in the way that carbon taxes are traded at the moment.

How do you *actually* propose we do the sums?

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Well, I'm starting off from some assumptions that might not be obvious.

I'm assuming that the goals are to provide food and energy security sustainably for as many humans as possible, with the least vulnerability to peturbation by systemic problems.

For reasons that I've argued elsewhere, that seems to me to imply providing food and energy subsistence based on solar flows, while maximising system closure in respect of other resources, e.g. soil nutrients.

So I think the smart way to proceed is to actually minimise resource distribution to what you absolutely can't avoid for achieving sustainability.

As far as possible, you're actually trying to maximise closure within local subsistence systems covering a few hundred hectares. Something like eco-villages. You're avoiding moving stuff around as far as possible because it has an unnecessary energy cost in most cases, and generally reduces closure, resulting in wasted soil nutrients, water and other key resources.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Do you actually think that there is a conspiracy against people becoming self-sufficient in a variety of ways, because they would then no longer "need" the centralised state? That sounds a bit conspiraloon to me.....

Most people don't *want* to live in self-sufficient enclaves so they can tell everyone else to fuck off, do they?

Only hard-line greens mixed with survivalists, surely?

Giles..

I don't think there is a conspiracy no. I just think it's a natural consequence of the economic system we have and I don't think I'm unique in holding this view see e.g. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch33.htm

As to what people want, historically and in many places in the developing world, what people have wanted and want now is food security through subsistence agriculture. See e.g. http://www.commoner.org.uk/10federici.pdf

In our society you're quite right to suggest that most people wouldn't see that vision as appealing, but we're reaching the crisis point and they may soon see things differently. Our entire way of life is based on cheap and plentiful fossil fuels.

We're already getting very close to the limits of the Earth to feed us all. See e.g. Outgrowing the Earth

We're using limited supplies of fossil energy so heavily and so stupidly that we're precipitating climate change and damaging our life support systems.

What I'm suggesting are some ways to address these isssues that look to me like they would be more helpful than what we're doing now.

 

[citydreams]

How do you *actually* propose we do the sums?

What's so complicated? It's a case of optimising the level of production to maximise the benefits to society.

Or, to put it another way:

If there is a scenario whereby the world can be sustainable then there must be an efficient allocation of those resources that minimizes the cost to each person.

 

[lostexpectation]

goldsmith confused

I genuinely thought this myself,

from don't bomb us

that when the Mirror told downing St that they were going to publish, Number 10 though it was stuff that was already out? So, when they saw the story they realised that another memo had been leaked and Lord Goldsmith was wheeled out with the big stick?


Bush is very good at creating underdogs