Waste pumps

This is a guest post by John Bell.

In March of 2004 I took a job as a hydraulic pump design engineer at a private company in Auburn Hills, Michigan. The company had a contract with the EPA (NVFEL) in Ann Arbor to design and build prototype hydraulic pumps to be used in hybrid UPS delivery trucks. The project was the brainchild of Charles Gray, who had been with the EPA since its inception, and who retired in 2012. I was happy to further my career and to be involved in this interesting project, to help design a drive train that would use hydraulic pumps and accumulators to capture braking energy and then reuse that energy to accelerate the vehicle again. I believed in the project for the first six months, and then I saw the light. Turns out it was just another wasteful government boondoggle.

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Notes from a conference

This is a guest post by Cameron Rose.

Just thought I'd share my brief diary from the Business and Climate conference at the UNESCO building in Paris on 20th/21st May 2015.  It is in the lead up to COP21 in December and I'm a delegate this week.

Arrived late and missed the opening warm-up from Christine Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC. The businessman in the next seat told me there had been nothing new from her.

Wed 20th PM.  I was in time to catch the second half of the 'Energy' thematic session, where there were six CEO-level panelists plus the Norwegian Minister of European Economic affairs.  I learned the following (perhaps a True/False quiz would be appropriate):

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Sir Paul's new politicking

With his time at the helm of the Royal Society winding down over the rest of the year, Sir Paul Nurse must have been starting to wonder how he could continue his work as a political agitator once he no longer had access to the Royal Society's pulpit. News today reveals that he may be exploring new niches:

A high level group of scientists is to be recruited to provide independent advice to the European Commission.

The panel will supersede the role of chief scientific advisor that was controversially abolished last year by new EC President Jean-Claude Juncker.

The commission wants also to strengthen its relationship with the national academies across Europe.

Sir Paul is going to be advising Mr Juncker on the recruitment of this group of scientists, so it will be interesting to see (a) if he ends up on the panel himself and (b) if its ranks are filled with the doomsters and millennarians whose company Sir Paul seems to find so congenial.

The benefits of public spending

In a bid to show how careful it is with taxpayer's cash, DECC has decided to launch a climate change photography competition.

Run by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), the #BackClimateAction 2015 competition opens on Friday 20 February.

Entries must be entered on Instagram or via Twitter.

Organisers say they are seeking an image that ‘challenges us to re-imagine climate change in the most original and engaging way’, by addressing one or more of the following: What do you most want to protect? (this could be your own or your family’s health); What feeling does climate change provoke? (e.g. loss, challenge, change or action); and What can tackling climate change lead to? (this could include changing technology, new ways of living, or new energy sources).

Yes folks, you are working your fingers to the bone so that "civil" "servants" can spend their time looking at pretty snapshots.

Diary dates, moving on edition

Julia Slingo is to give the Cabot lecture in Bristol on 4 February (details here). Here's the trailer:

The impact of human activity on our climate has become increasingly clear: with the IPCC stating that “Human influence on the climate system is unequivocal”. It has become clear that we are taking the planet into uncharted territory and changing the risk of extreme weather and climate events. Our exposure to these risks is also changing as a result of changes in how we live and a rapidly growing global population.

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DECC's new adviser

DECC has finally persuaded someone to take on the role of chief scientific adviser - as readers no doubt recall the role his been vacant for several weeks since David Mackay stood down.

The new man is Professor John Loughhead, who currently runs the UK Energy Research Centre, a sort of retirement home for superannuated environmentalists. Loughhead is an engineer by training and was formerly the head of technology at wind turbine manufacturer Alstom. His professorship is an honorary one from the University of Cardiff.

His public pronouncements suggest that he is cut from the same cloth as Mackay - he will go with the political flow, setting out just enough of the engineering problems with the rush to renewables to cover his backside.

Our neutral civil service

I awake this morning to find my timeline awash with spam from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, furiously retweeting the launch of a report by the New Climate Economy group, a group of green-minded economists headed by Lord Stern and including such eco-figureheads as Ottmar Edenhofer.

In fact there were so many retweets about the report that I could only repost a few here.

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Scientists decline the poison chalice

When it was announced that David Mackay would be stepping down from his role as chief scientific adviser at DECC, I speculated that it might be a tricky vacancy to fill, what with rumours of blackouts impending.

Here we are nearly six months later. Mackay has gone and no scientist seems to have stepped forward to take up the poison chalice.

I would say they chose...wisely.

Spotting policy-based evidencemaking

Oxford economist Simon Wren-Lewis has a blog on the subject of macroeconomics called Mainly Macro. I chanced upon it this morning via my Twitter feed.

His latest post is about policy-based evidencemaking and who you should trust. There's plenty of good stuff in there, but plenty to take issue with too. For example, being an academic, he has an overly high opinion of academics:

I know I’ll get it in the neck for saying this, but if the analysis is done by academics you can be relatively confident that the analysis is of a reasonable quality and not overtly biased. In contrast, work commissioned from, say, an economic consultancy is less trustworthy. This follows from the incentives either group faces.  

In the climate debate at least, this confidence is misplaced.

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Bureaucrats are above the law

From the USA come further evidence that the bureaucracy there is out of control and above the law. I suspect the same is the case here in the UK. The story revolves around Chris Horner's ongoing attempts to get hold of correspondence of senior staff within the Environmental Protection Agency and in particular their text messages. The response of officials seems to have been wholesale deletion of the relevant records, directly flouting data retention legislation.

...they are destroying them, illegally. This isn't a "gaping open-records loophole," it is wanton lawbreaking because the law is quite clear.

The texts EPA produced on Friday prove that EPA's IT system does not automatically delete text messages; that is, for messages not to be there now, they had to be deleted from the system.

These texts also show that not everyone destroyed all of their messages, as McCarthy has admitted she did. Her behavior was deliberate, serial and flagrant.

Congress is doing nothing; the Justice Department is doing whatever it can to ensure the lawbreaking goes unpunished. It is therefore down to the courts to enforce the law.

I'm not holding my breath.

Fewer climate movies for the natives

From time to time I have noted the Foreign and Commonwealth Office's spending on a network of "climate change advisers". On one occasion, I noted one such public funded official using their time to do research for Democrats in the US Congress. Another seemed to fill her days with showing ecodisaster movies to the natives and helping them to make their own ones.

It's therefore quite pleasing to see that William Hague has belatedly been reining back the spending somewhat:

The UK is slashing its climate change diplomacy budget even as global efforts to reach a deal intensify, RTCC can reveal.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) cut spending on its core climate change activities by 39% over the past three years.

Given Hague's posturing as a green, this has no doubt been driven more by the cost-cutting imperative in the Treasury than any concern over whether the money is being well spent. Nevertheless, one should not look a gift horse in the mouth...

Beddington honoured

BH favourite Sir John Beddington has been awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon. I kid you not.

Sir John Beddington, the former UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser (GCSA), has been awarded the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays with Neck Ribbon (Kyokujitsu Chu-Jusho) from the Emperor of Japan.

The award was apparently prompted by Sir John's advice to the British Embassy and UK expats in Japan after the Fukishima incident.

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Why?

Reuters is carrying a report that the German Environment Agency is trying to kill off any shale gas developments in that country. The bureaucrats lack the ability to put an outright ban in place, so the intention seems to be to apply a garotte of red tape to neck of the infant industry.

A spokeswoman for the environment ministry said draft laws on fracking would be presented to the cabinet after the summer break. She added that the rules laid out in the water protection law - the responsibility of the environment ministry - would mean that fracking would be ruled out in the foreseeable future.

Bizarrely though, the report notes that German gas companies have used fracked non-shale gas formations - so called "tight gas" - for decades without incident. And a recent moratorium on new tight gas licences is expected to be lifted at the same time as the shale industry is strangled.

I'm struggling to understand the apparent inconsitency.

Walport's Walker words

Mark Walport gave the annual Walker lecture at the University of Reading a couple of weeks ago, taking as his theme climate change communication.

H/T Barry Woods

Silly social science

From the long and turgid annals of the Society of Silly Social Science Studies comes a paper by two academics at the University of Maine. Bridie McGreavy and Laura Lindenfeld have been examining three examples of the cinematographer's art as applied to the global warming debate, namely The Day After Tomorrow, Sizzle and An Inconvenient Truth.

All three films had their critics. All three have their factual errors and distortions. All three have their hidden agendas. None of the films is peer-reviewed science...obviously. Nevertheless, such storytelling does have an impact on popular culture and public perception regarding a given issue. McGreavy and Lindenfeld suggest that dominant representations of race and gender in these films fail to align with the key sustainable development goals of equity, freedom and shared responsibility. Instead, their position as "entertainment" influences our sense of the world, guides our relationships and may well affect, in a detrimental manner, our collective abilities to create a sustainable future.

You thought that the problem with An Inconvenient Truth was that it was a lot of scientific baloney. But actually the film's big failing is that it reinforces "racial, gender and sexual stereotypes". Who would have thought it?