Sustainable economics
Thomas Hogg says your discussion on the perils of growth (18 October, p 40) is naive 鈥� but it seems to me that it is he who doesn’t understand the situation (8 November, p 20). The point at issue is whether or not an exponentially growing economy is sustainable. Instead of attempting to refute the case that it is not, Hogg argues that a static economy won’t be popular or simple to devise.
This is not rational. Some unpopular arguments are true, just as some popular ones are false. Even if it were true that a static economy is unachievable this wouldn’t constitute evidence that growth is sustainable, but merely evidence that the economy will grow until civilisation collapses.
Unemployment is not the only way to limit output: reducing working hours is also an option. Hogg’s requirements, such as “creative destruction” driving innovation, could be met if businesses competed for market share and on the basis of productivity per worker hour. Government would meanwhile ensure resource use remained stable through legislation to reduce working hours.
This will only work, of course, given international cooperation to ensure that nation states compete on a level playing field.
From Peter Brown
Thomas Hogg suggests using economic incentives to create more sustainability. On the same page Andrew Clifton provides some ideas (8 November, p 20). I suggest that we should recognise the limited availability of non-renewable resources by making them available only for rent.
To do this would be difficult, but not impossible. It would create a chain of recycling from raw material to consumer, and encourage long-lasting products designed to be dismantled and reused 鈥� as proposed by Herman Daly (18 October, p 52).
In the case of fuel, which cannot be returned, users would rack up charges indefinitely for their use to date. The promise to introduce such a charge gradually at some time in the future should affect behaviour.
York, UK
From Damien Flinter
Thomas Hogg writes that your authors “do not appear to understand the dynamics of the capitalist model”, before launching into a selective eulogy of “creative destruction” as a high-tech, industry-spawning dynamo generating ever-increasing circles of prosperity and social evolution. He then disparages an all-knowing central agency that might regulate his utopian market; one that no contributor had actually suggested.
The figures I have say that close to a billion of our population are living in hunger, and 10,000 children a day die in Africa from starvation.
Perhaps Hogg has better data: if not, I hope he might consider that there is objective evidence of fundamental systemic pathology in the capitalist model. It will require teamwork and radical rethinking of our presumptions and rationalisations if the world is to avoid degenerating into a series of warring totalitarian regimes, like those created by the last global economic meltdown.
Or perhaps he might ask the Aboriginal peoples of his native land to present data on the centrifugal social effects of centripetal wealth accumulators on the destructive side of his creative equation.
Headford, Galway, Ireland
Carbon begins at home
Why should industry have to pay a price for carbon emissions when they are free for the rest of us? Conversely, if putting a price on carbon emissions through cap-and-trade is such a well-researched idea (11 October, p 13), why don’t we get paid carbon credits when we install energy-saving light bulbs, insulate our home or use our car less often?
The “cap-and-share” carbon scheme mentioned by James Bruges (19 July, p 20) is little better: forcing a reduction in annual fuel sales to a sustainable level and compensating people for the rise in the cost of living is not the same as rewarding people for reducing their own carbon footprint of their own accord. It implies that we have a right to emit carbon, instead of having a duty to reduce emissions, just as industry does.
It may be easier to target big industry, but a sustainable scheme that facilitates and rewards individuals weaning themselves off fossil fuels is also needed.
Driven to extremes
Your interview with Jack Martin (25 October, p 42) used up two precious pages in which you could have interviewed someone more relevant to the current problems of overuse of oil resources. The most important way to reduce planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles is to use diesel engines.
A two-stroke diesel with a supercharger (rather than crankcase compression) to fill the cylinder could achieve 2.8 litres per 100 kilometres (100 miles to the imperial gallon) at 100 kilometres per hour with an average car. Problems such as particulate emissions have been solved. It is cheaper to extract diesel from crude oil, you get more of it per barrel, and diesel engines are sturdier and last much longer. These are some of the reasons that over 75 per cent of cars bought in France are diesel-powered.
The ozone gap
I was particularly interested in your report on Joe Farman’s discovery of the ozone hole (20 September, p 46) because I was secretary to the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the parent body of the British Antarctic Survey, from 1981 to 1989. I visited the head of NASA in Washington on several occasions, and the agency never claimed to have found the ozone hole before Farman asked for its original data.
My understanding is that NASA missed the decline in ozone because its systems automatically excluded all readings which were more than two standard deviations from the long-term mean. No one noticed that an ever-increasing number of readings were being discarded, as the then US president’s deputy science adviser confirmed when he visited me in the mid-1980s.
I also recall much discussion in NERC about whether it was worth continuing measurements of atmospheric composition over the base at Halley Bay in Antarctica, since they seemed to have shown little change over the previous 25 years.
Collecting long-running environmental data series can mop up a lot of money and often yields little of interest 鈥� but you never know when something might turn up.
Genetic identity
I was somewhat surprised to read that “some lines of laying hens share a staggering 90 per cent of their genes” (8 November, p 7), and that White Leghorns shared 15 per cent.
Since chimpanzees and humans share approximately 94 per cent of their genes, 90 per cent similarity suggests quite a diverse group.
Sharing just 15 per cent of genes would make White Leghorns different from just about every group of living organisms on the planet.
The editor writes:
鈥� We used the researchers’ phrasing: when they say two laying hens share one gene, they mean it is identical, with virtually the same sequence of base pairs coding for an identical protein. When other researchers say that cabbages and professors share one gene, they mean that it is, for example, a gene that when active produces the enzyme citrate synthase 鈥� though the sequences almost certainly differ in detail.
The need to meet
Bill Johns states that “video-conferencing will improve to the extent that substantial travel will become unnecessary”, reducing carbon emissions (15 November, p 24). This is a fantasy.
We know that non-verbal communication is the majority of any communication in the flesh. Video-conferencing adds a little to pure voice communication, but misses most of the nuances that face-to-face meetings make apparent.
The establishment of a business relationship depends on each side understanding what can be expected from the other. This is easier to achieve in a social setting: a lunch, dinner or other event in which the guarded forms that are natural in a business meeting can fall away.
It might seem that a contract involving a few tens of thousands of pounds is not important enough that such nuances matter, but such a contract may be the saviour of a struggling company and the basis of business worth considerably more.
Travel to gain confidence in potential business partners will be essential long after oil has ceased to be the main fuel source for such travel.
Relatively wrong
Mark Buchanan writes that the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics is one of the deepest mysteries of them all (1 November, p 28).
Equally mysterious questions include: from where does mathematics originate; what is its basis; and are the “rules” of mathematics multiversal?
Does Euler’s identity ei蟺 + 1 = 0, for example, hold in all universes 鈥� including those that have non-Euclidean geometries in which the circumference of a circle is not 蟺 times its diameter?
Are there universes in which the prime numbers are different to ours, such as universes of non-integer dimensions?
If so, why so? If not, why not?
I was fascinated to read of an alternative mathematical formulation to special relativity, one that might provide fundamental insights. But one premise of the article seems to be stating the obvious.
Relativity is not about the properties of light. The formulation of a four-dimensional space-time by the mathematician Hermann Minkowski is elegant and profound. The “speed of light” enters this formulation as a fundamental constant of physics, linking the dimensions of space and time. The fact that it is a limiting velocity can be derived from the properties of this geometry.
This is a problem of language, not physics. If photons, like neutrinos, were found to have mass then “the speed of light” would become a misnomer needing to be replaced by a term such as “Einstein’s constant”.
Denholme, West Yorkshire, UK
Hunting's no help
I find it extraordinary that Bill Barnes recommends “controlled hunting” as a means of species preservation. Why does it appear necessary to some to reduce species populations to more viable levels by hunting, when “environmental circumstances” and disease are already achieving this reduction (1 November, p 21)?
The passenger pigeon’s extinction is well documented. The species was first hunted at a low level, then in the last few decades of the 19th century at industrial scales until it suffered its ultimate population crash.
The passenger pigeon’s biology required very high densities of birds for successful breeding and feeding 鈥� circumstances that the severely reduced numbers could not maintain.
Those who support recreational hunting of animals, fish and birds regularly try to justify their activities by claiming that they are helpful to their target’s survival. There are almost no examples where these claims can be supported. Face it, all first-world hunting is done for fun.
Not green yet
David Rose fears that New 杏吧原创 may have to change its name to Green 杏吧原创 (1 November, p 20). Don’t worry, David. While it continues to publish articles about space tourism (1 November, p 5 and p 24) without any mention of the likely consequences to the environment, I don’t think you have any cause for concern.
For the record
鈥� An editorial clarification that misfired had us referring to “the still-unratified… Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Watercourses and International Lakes” (8 November, p 8). . We were actually discussing the Convention on the Law of Non-navigational Uses of International Watercourses, which was .
A something-for-nothing universe
Lawrence Krauss has missed the point, in at least two ways, in his response to the question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” (22 November, p 53). If the universe is flat, and the total energy of a flat universe is zero, all that tells us is that no energy input was required to create the universe. The universe could have been created out of no matter/energy. It does not tell us, however, how the universe got started.
The question of the theologian Thomas Aquinas can be rephrased along the lines of: “If there was once nothing, really nothing, not even the quantum vacuum, then how is it possible for something/anything to have got started?” The quantum vacuum is not nothing, and it is not zero energy; it is simply the lowest possible energy state in our universe.
The corollary to Aquinas’s question is: “Is there an infinite regression of causes ‘behind’ our universe, or is there a stopping point, a ‘first cause’ or a ‘brute fact’, something that simply exists of itself, uncaused?” Is the quantum vacuum the thing that simply exists and brought our universe into existence, or is there something else that brought the quantum vacuum into existence, and, if there is, how many more layers of causation are there?
The non-question of meaning
In a previous letter (9 August, p 20) I remarked on the obscurity of religious apologists’ search for “meaning”. Now Merle Arrowsmith offers more of the same in response to Lawrence Krauss’s “big ideas” (27 September, p 49) by suggesting that “Even those with a sound scientific background are more likely to ask: ‘What is the meaning of life? Is there more to life than what we see? Why so much suffering? Is there hope in this life?'” (25 October, p 19). For centuries people have asked “What is the meaning of life?” without apparently having the foggiest idea that they are asking a non-question.
What could be meant by life having a “meaning”? Why not ask for the meaning of a neutron star? That would be an equally obscure non-question. Contrast this with one of the questions Krauss referred to in his commentary: “How did life arise on Earth?” It is at once absolutely clear what this precise question means, and there is some hope that an answer may eventually be found, with evidence to support it. If I were to classify questions according to their importance, any referring to the “meaning of life” would be thrown aside as vague religious waffle.
Feeding your gizmos
I was involved with training colleagues to use laptops in the 1990s and at that time I could safely tell them to fully charge the batteries, then disconnect the charger until the batteries were close to being discharged, as you suggest (15 November, p 42).
Late in the 1990s the situation began to change; the manual for my wife’s laptop, manufactured about four years back, clearly states that the charger should be left fully powered whilst the laptop is in use.
It appears that the old adage of “Read The Manual” applies (unless the manual has already been consigned to the recycling bin).
Wood's worth
In his article on energy from biomass, Colin Barras says that the problem with it is that felled trees have an energy density of only 7 gigajoules per tonne (11 October, p 39). True, newly felled trees contain 50 per cent moisture or more. Chipping wood in this condition and then transporting it in bulk to a power plant many miles away to generate electricity is senseless.
Cutting wet wood into small logs and air-drying will bring the moisture content down to less than 20 per cent and increase the energy content to over 14 gigajoules per tonne. Admittedly this demands time and space, but doubling energy output surely has to be worthwhile.
Beyond the Palin
Lawrence Krauss heaps scorn on Sarah Palin for her “outlandish claim” that the vice-president is in charge of the Senate (1 November, p 48), and casually parrots the oft-repeated claim that she couldn’t name a single important US Supreme Court decision other than Roe v Wade.
One duty of the vice-president is to be president of the Senate 鈥� and it is their responsibility to cast a tie-breaking vote there. Interviewer Katie Couric in fact asked Sarah Palin whether she could name any Supreme Court decisions other than Roe v Wade with which she disagreed, not just any decision.