Religion and evil
While it is perfectly true that people do extremely unpleasant things to each other without the excuse of religion, as Mary Midgley reminds us, it hardly negates the point that Richard Dawkins makes in his new book The God Delusion (7 October, p 50).
It is important to realise that there was a definite religious dimension to the actions of the atheist regimes of both Stalin and Hitler, too. Both dictators had strong religious influences in their early lives: Stalin trained for the priesthood and Hitler had been an altar boy. Hitler retained a lifelong respect for the authority and rituals of the Catholic Church. Each understood the enormous power of religion and set out to use the trappings and techniques of the church to set up a form of “secular faith”, using all the methods of religious indoctrination to form new societies every bit as intolerant as any preceding society fixated on religion.
They succeeded all too well, and their successors Pol Pot, Mao Tse-Tung and Kim Jong-il have continued the same systems. Faith without reason is the root of the problem, surely, and it all comes back to the God delusion.
Retrocausality
The article on retrocausality seems to be implying that John Cramer and others are on the verge of sending messages back in time (30 September, p 36). They are not. Retrocausality is a conceptual model, not some factual aspect of the physical world requiring explanation. It tells us nothing about the world that we can’t already understand by other means.
Such an experiment is important because although it won’t succeed in sending messages back in time, it will succeed in showing how retrocausality is both redundant and a trap.
Set-aside for fuel
One thing occurs to me reading your article on biofuels, and that is the European set-aside scheme and its equivalent in the US (23 September, p 36). Originally driven by political memories of second world war shortages, European farmers were subsidised to produce so much food that it resulted in having to pay twice for some of it (the second time to dispose of the excess). Even now, Europe has resorted to paying its farmers to grow nothing on certain portions of their land.
Why not, therefore, modify the set-aside scheme so that the growing of suitably chosen biomass crops is allowed, provided that it receives no chemical treatment and no irrigation. In this way, the extra crop would have no impact on the world food markets, and incur no extra expense to the environment, other than the costs of planting and harvesting.
From Ray Buchan
The article on biofuels provided a wealth of information, but it is not clear whether it took the low energy density of ethanol (about 66 per cent of the value for gasoline) into account. I could not find any mention of energy densities in the article and am left wondering if the stated agricultural land areas required for ethanol, or the potential reductions in greenhouse gas emissions include the difference in energy density.
It is worth pointing out that the energy density of biodiesel is about 90 per cent that of ordinary diesel, so the effect of energy density on any calculations would be much less.
Bourne, Massachusetts, US
From Malcolm Slesser
Fred Pearce is right. Biofuels are not all they are cracked up to be. The key criterion for biofuels is the net energy per hectare per year. In 1979 I co-authored a book with Chris Lewis 鈥� Biological Energy Resources 鈥� in which we analysed several sources of bioenergy. Most showed negative net energy. Only sugar cane and coppicing wood fuels showed a positive value.
Pearce says that there is uncertainty over the methodology, but the methodology is well established. In 1972 the International Federation of Institutes for Advanced Study (IFIAS) pulled together 25 scientists, engineers and economists from around the world to deliberate on the appropriate conventions for such calculations, and later published them under the rubric “Energy Analysis”. These conventions have subsequently found their way into several more recent texts. I have found them invaluable as they enable different researchers to compare like with like.
Edinburgh, UK
Passenger pods and steam cars
Some of your readers of my generation may have noticed the coincidental link between the two letters regarding aircraft passenger pods and steam cars (16 September, p 23). Neither of these two ideas was allowed to advance, mostly, many of us felt, because they would have compromised the profitability of powerful big businesses.
As a young aircraft structures engineer in 1959 at Vickers at Weybridge in Surrey, UK, I and a few other aero engineers examined the aircraft pod idea with the late John R. Cooper (a former University of Cambridge graduate who had worked closely with Barnes Wallis). Apart from the weight penalty, we discarded the idea when it became clear it would have deprived the world’s airports of the income they gained from passengers spending loads of money at departures and arrivals.
The first steam car was built around 1770. A successful steam car outpaced the early internal combustion car at the new Brooklands Racing Track around 1910. However, such was the popularity and fascination of the internal combustion engine, that it became fashionable to discredit steam. Big business was by then investing heavily in the internal combustion engine. Names such as Vauxhaul, Benz, Wolseley started to become big.
Steam perished while global warming started. The internal combustion engine pushed forward the demand for oil. For a century, our dependency on oil heavily influenced international politics. It may yet wipe out civilisation. One cannot help but wonder how the 20th century would have evolved if steam power, fired by renewable fuels, had been successfully developed in 1910.
Messing with the mind
Gaia Vince writes that legal highs are “a battleground between those who see the use of mind-altering drugs as a human right and those who think it is plain wrong” (30 September, p 40).
There is another, to me more interesting, issue: what is it that causes some people to want to mess with their brain chemistry, while others show no inclination whatsoever to do so? As someone in the latter category, who has never been remotely interested in recreational drugs, I would be glad to see some well-founded and convincing explanations of this.
Ethical meat
Speaking as a British beef farmer I agree wholeheartedly with Peter Singer (7 October, p 22). I have always refused to defend both pork and poultry production in the UK on the grounds that to do so was to condone utterly inhumane production systems. Our beef is “single suckled”, the system whereby the cows calve in spring and then suckle their calves at grass all summer before the calves are weaned away from their mothers in the autumn and sold on to be reared for slaughter. This is as natural a system as can commercially be made to work, and suits the animals well.
What Singer fails to address is that the “factory” farming systems have been brought about by the cut-throat pressures of the modern food retail chain and the demand for ever cheaper food.
“Finished” cattle ready for slaughter are still not trading at even 80 per cent of the prices they were making in the mid-1980s but costs have almost universally risen. If the consumer wants ethical and holistic food they must pay for it, and the retailer must pass on the extra margin. This is where farmers’ markets are working so well.
Emdrive? No thanks
The article about Roger Shawyer implies that EADS Astrium suppressed this miracle drive for nefarious business reasons (9 September, p 30). The truth (sorry, conspiracy theorists!) is rather different. As the then technical director of Astrium, I reviewed Roger’s work and concluded that both theory and experiment were fatally flawed. Roger was advised that the company had no interest in the device, did not wish to seek patent coverage, and in fact did not wish to be associated with it in any way. The letters you have published point out some of the issues (7 October, p 24).
I was also surprised by the “end of wings and wheels?” tagline on the cover. Even if the device did work, the thrust/power ratio claimed by Roger would make it impractical for any terrestrial transport application.
Our laws of nature
Lee Smolin ponders whether laws of nature are immutable for ever 鈥� for example, Newton’s model versus Einstein’s (23 September, p 30). These theories are human-made, while nature was what it was before humans came about. We have invented these laws that are subject to improvements and evolution.
杏吧原创s wonder how the universal constants are so fine-tuned that even small deviations would make the world impossible. This is a bottom-up concept. The top-down approach is that the possible universe exists and is the way it is. It is we who have found the models and constants that fit it. If the laws of nature were different in the early universe, we can never fathom them.
The Sun won't save us
We were disappointed by the narrow focus of the cover story on global warming, which ignores most of the arguments against solar activity having a significant effect on recent climate change (16 September, p 32).
For instance, changes in volcanic activity can explain most, if not all, of the climate change in the last millennium that has been attributed solely to solar influence. Correlation with solar activity does not mean causation, especially when several different factors can influence climate. Both the Maunder minimum and the early 19th-century reductions in solar activity were associated with periods of increased volcanic activity. The latter includes the 1816 Tambora eruption, associated with the “year without a summer”.
While some studies show a considerable link between solar activity and climate, most studies that include all potentially relevant factors find a much smaller solar contribution. Recent research by scientists at many institutions around the world, including ourselves, suggests that the sun may have made a detectable contribution to global warming in the early 20th century, but hasn’t done so since 1950. Human and volcanic influences have swamped it since then.
To understand causes of climate change, we should take all plausible influences into account, as well as their often considerable uncertainties. When we do so, we find the sun’s effect over the recent past is small compared with the impact of human-induced climate change. We will need to make considerable improvements in understanding both the physics of solar variations and the climate’s response to those changes before we can have any confidence in what future changes in climate, if any, may be due to the sun.
Think small
George Monbiot accuses me of grossly over-hyping solar power in my book Half Gone (30 September, p 24). It was BP who originally asserted that solar photovoltaics could theoretically provide all the electricity the UK now uses if solar cells of existing efficiency were placed on all available roof space. I echoed that assertion, but Monbiot would have preferred me to cite a paper from a peer-reviewed journal rather than the publicity material of an oil company. Oil companies, after all, have a long record of saying how powerful and desirable a resource solar energy is, don’t they? Monbiot in turn cites a think tank favoured by the Department of Trade and Industry which, using out-of-date efficiency information, says solar would fall short of providing all the UK’s electricity.
Why don’t we look at the track record and extrapolate from there? I myself have lived in a house that over the course of a year generated more electricity from a small solar roof than it consumed, with permanent occupancy and a daughter with an energy-vampire hairdryer protractedly in use on a daily basis. Why can’t every house do that, theoretically? In most commercial and industrial buildings, there is more roof space than you would need to generate the load used.
I say “theoretically” because I never advocated trying to generate all the UK’s electricity from solar, as Monbiot seems to imply I did. I advocate use of the complete mix of renewables, and of course the essential handmaiden of solar: energy efficiency.
Finally, Monbiot throws the cost of solar at me, this time citing that well-known supporter of new-energy thinking, the International Energy Agency (set up by governments to promote fossil fuels). Enough solar cells to generate all the UK’s energy would be vastly expensive, says the IEA. What about economies of scale in manufacturing? If we did get to that kind of scale, the cost of manufacturing 鈥� already close to the cost of other forms of generation for the grid in Spain, Italy, Portugal and Denmark 鈥� would have plummeted below the point where solar electricity becomes cheaper than today’s electricity.
Monbiot’s conclusion that “in almost all circumstances micro-wind turbines are a waste of time and money” is flawed, as it assumes that miniature replicas of offshore wind farms will always be the preferred choice. For domestic premises, his analysis can equally well lead to the conclusion that traditional wind machine layouts should now be abandoned in favour of arrangements specifically designed for this application.
For example: instead of regarding the effect that a house has on wind flow as a disadvantage, why not make use of the building itself, the largest surface area available, as the primary energy collector?
Technical problems are a challenge, not a full stop. Change the design to overcome identified problems rather than condemn the whole concept because one particular wind turbine configuration is unsuitable.
Abingdon, Oxfordshire, UK
I suggest that Monbiot visits a home such as ours that is not connected to the national grid, but is dependent on the low-wattage sources he eschews. He would find that it is very easy to combine these sources to provide virtually all of one’s household electricity.
We run a small farm and an engineering business, and have raised three children on wind, solar and a 48-watt micro-hydroelectric generator. We have three computers, two freezers, a refrigerator, clothes washer, power tools and fax machine. This letter is being transmitted on one of these computers using this energy. The system is very reliable, and the main differences we see are that our lights stay on when a storm knocks out the electricity to our neighbours on the grid, and we make no payment to the electric company.
No sane person would attach a wind turbine to a house as Monbiot suggests. They are usually mounted on rather simple guyed towers. They are invariably shorter than the 65 metres that would be a hazard to aircraft that he worries about. No one has ever complained about our wind system.
Solar panels always face south in the northern hemisphere and not at “all points of the compass”, as he suggests. Those facing north would be useless for generating electricity.
Monbiot needs to stop reading articles that measure in terawatts and visit some of us in the real world who measure in plain old watts. Home-generated electricity is definitely part of the solution.
Shrewsbury, Vermont, US
From Anthony Battersby, Mendip Power Group
Monbiot complains that potential buyers of home generators are being misled. It would be helpful if he distinguished between pico-generation (up to 10 kilowatts) and micro-generation (10-100 kW).
Most run-of-river hydro in England is micro-generation and is not a waste of time. Our micro-hydro plant (55 kW) will be up and running this year and will generate enough electricity to serve the hamlet where we live. It will save about 140 tonnes of CO2 per year, offsetting the amount generated by about 14 homes. England has about 20,000 run-of-river mill sites. If these harnessed the maximum potential of each site then up to 1 million homes (4 per cent) in England could be running on renewable electricity generated without upsetting the neighbours.
The whole-life energy harvest factor (ratio of total energy generated to total energy consumed to implement, operate and demolish the plant) for run-of-river micro-hydro is over 40, which is the best of any existing technology.
Monbiot says we should greatly expand the national grid to carry energy from places where renewable energy is abundant to areas where demand for electricity is high. Yet the national grid is a major source of energy wastage. Power losses during transmission of electricity are estimated at 2.5 per cent per 100 kilometres. There is little sense in increasing these power losses by expanding the national grid.
Transmission losses together with the requirement for back-up generation severely limit the effectiveness of wind power. Back-up generation alone may negate 40 per cent of the output derived from wind farms. Thus to supply London with power from a wind farm located 1100 kilometres distant on the Isle of Lewis would nullify almost 70 per cent of the energy harvested from the wind.
Finally, it is surprising that Monbiot ignores the potential of tidal energy. A tidal barrage on the Severn estuary could replicate the output of 4000 wind turbines, and would not require extensive grid expansion.
Kinross, Perth and Kinross, UK
Monbiot’s article on the futility of using domestic wind turbines to help deal with climate change unfortunately contains the hidden subtext that we should do nothing. Granted he recommends large off-shore wind farms, but these would depend on government, and to expect anything there is to fly in the face of hard data.
The reality is that government will be led by the people and, to this end, we should start preparing ourselves to deal with the effects of climate change. This can only be done by increasing our self-sufficiency 鈥� house by house, street by street 鈥� with solutions being tailored appropriate to local needs and resources.
So, what to do? Readers of New 杏吧原创 should set an example. It hardly disrupts the lifestyle to use economy light bulbs, to recycle tins, bottles and papers, to use shopping bags instead of plastic ones, to put excess hot water from the kettle into a flask, to use rainwater for the garden and cleaning the car 鈥� perhaps even for flushing the toilet 鈥� or to turn down the thermostat a notch. To those who would confuse the mundaneness of these and other simple actions with triviality, I would say that they will not be trivial when several million households do them 鈥� and if we, as individuals, do not do them, who will?