Debt

So, we’re all fairly sure that the current economic crisis is something to do with the banks lending money to people who couldn’t finance their debts. We’re reasonably sure of this because we’re quite certain that the American Sub-Prime mortgage market was where the problems started and that if they’d not lent money to those people then we’d all be fine now and would be enjoying the same level of economic growth as before. How true is all this ‘knowledge’ though?

Money is debt. The available pool of cash with which to do things comes from each of our promises to finance our debts. The money you paid for your house with almost certainly doesn’t physically exist anywhere. Unless you’re in the minute minority of people who paid for their house from their earnings, then you got out a mortgage, the majority of which would have been created ex-nihilo. It exists as a string of 1s and 0s on a computer. As you pay/paid your mortgage off most of the money you gave back disappeared. It had never truly existed in the first place. The only money which didn’t disappear was the interest and the reserve deposit equivalent. That is the amount they have which they can lend from. The ‘real’ money that allows them to make fake money out of nothing more than your promise to repay. Their reserve ratio could be as high as 24:1, they could be able to loan out 25 times the real money they have.

Okay, so the bank can lend out more money than it actually has, but this fake money it creates is destroyed as it’s repaid, leaving only the real money and the interest. At a reserve ratio of 9:1 (as I understand it, a fairly low, reasonably common rate) they can collect interest on a £10,000 loan while only having £1,111.12 of real money. The interest on that £10,000 loan is theirs to keep and they only need to recover £1,111.12 to get their initial investment back, the rest of the £10k will be destroyed once repaid anyway. Of course, that £10,000 loan will be deposited somewhere once the loan’s been used for whatever it was intended for. The £10,000 loan, once deposited, can be then used to make a further loan of £9,000. That £9,000 loan can then be used to make a further loan of £8,100, and so on until we’re approaching £100,000 of loans (and the interest payments on those loans) for a £1,111.12 initial deposit. If there were only one loan made then the bank could only collect on the £10,000 initial loan. However, with dozens of smaller loans after the initial large loan the bank can collect on £100,000. Lending to lots of people wanting smaller quantities makes the bank a lot of money from nothing.

So the banks can make the huge loans that large businesses want, then use those to make medium loans that medium businesses want, then use those to make loans that small businesses want, then use those to make loans that consumers want. All of the loans made with the same initial deposit by the central bank. And the interest collected on all of the loans can then be used to make more loans and collect more interest.

Of course, no bank would get the deposits from their own loan from every stage of this process, but since the banking system is a closed system, it effectively means that, since each bank gets some deposits from every other bank’s loans, it works out to the same thing in the end.

So, the total amount of money in the system and the total amount of interest the banks can ‘earn’ is entirely dependent on the demand for debt. If you can find a way to give money to everyone demanding debt in such a way that you can get your money back in some way, with some interest, then you will. Capitalist greed demands that we do everything possible to get that extra penny of profit. It doesn’t matter if your business model is that you lend money to people to buy houses, knowing they will probably be unable to pay, because you’re gambling that their house will be worth enough to cover that by the time you come to repossess it, you will do it, collect your profit and sleep sound at night. Ethical considerations are not part of a capitalist system.

That’s a lot of explaining to essentially say that the sub-prime market was good for the economy, until the housing market started to shrink instead of grow. Once houses were starting to lose value rather than gain it the system stopped working, the gamble turned sour. Our long, sustained growth period was thanks in no small part to the extra money generated by the sub-prime market. It’s just sad that the means we chose to fend off a small deflationary period will have the effect of causing a massive deflationary period. Cest la vie.

Growth isn’t sustainable. I’ve said it many times within the course of writing entries for this blog, but I feel the need to say it once again. Growth is not sustainable. No level of growth is sustainable. No level of depletion is sustainable. It’s logically obvious that both of these statements are necessarily true. Yet, our culture doesn’t accept that logic. It says that either the conclusion is wrong or that some form of technology will appear to allow us to defeat the conclusion. The amazing tech fix.

We have been lulled into believing in the tech fix because it’s worked for so long now that we can’t perceive a time when human innovation will not provide us with new and innovative ways to continue killing the planet. We even imagine such a situation – where we can’t think of a new way to continue business as usual – as horrific. It would be terrible if we had to deal with the Earth as a partner and not as a slave! Tech fixes have been possible because of easy access to cheap energy. If peak oil strips us of our easy access to cheap energy, will the tech fixes be possible? Probably not if we’ve not done wide scale, serious investment in the alternatives prior to the peak. If, as some people argue, the world has already peaked, then we’re too late. Time to ride the roller coaster.

Those Less Fortunate

One of the essays I have recently been asked to write for my politics degree was titled “Should democracies be concerned about the losers in a capitalist system?” As part of the process I went through in answering the question I asked a few of my non-politics student friends the question to get their views and almost unanimously they answered ‘yes’. Their gut reaction was that we as a society should care about the people who are given the short end of the stick by the capitalist system we have in operation. When I pressed them to ask if they would be willing to pay more taxes to finance this caring they were almost unanimous again in their answer: No.

I tried to get to the root of this apparent (well, to my mind anyway) contradiction of opinion. How did they envision the government would help those who lose out if they were not to spend any money on helping. They didn’t want the losers to be helped, just for their to be concern that they were losing out. I was confused. I tried to argue that concern without action was the same as no concern at all. Their argument was that we can be concerned and use that concern to limit our actions and so make sure the losers don’t lose out too much. I asked who was to police this, they didn’t want anyone to. I asked how we would ensure that the losers don’t lose too much, they said we didn’t. I asked who defined too much and they said it was down to the individual. I asked how this was to stop anything. I was missing the point.

I don’t think that concern without any action, limits, etc, is actually concern at all. I think concern without action is simply ego stroking. We can be concerned without acting and so we can feel better about paying slave labour wages. We are concerned after all, that’s enough. We can be concerned without acting to stop mass species extinctions. We are concerned after all, that’s enough.

When a question about change is asked it is almost always limited, qualified, in such a way as to be essentially: How can we change everything without changing anything? For example: How can we make a sustainable society while protecting economic growth? You can’t, sustainable and growing are against one another. If something is growing then it’s not sustainable. The economy is part of society, if it’s growing then society is growing. If society is growing then it’s not sustainable. How can we change everything without changing anything?

How can we cut greenhouse gas emissions without slowing economic growth. Well, economic growth is almost predicated upon the release of greenhouse gas emissions. It almost necessitates the externalising of costs, for example efficient, effective clean up of pollutants. How can we change everything without changing anything?

The question posted by my politics tutors was aimed at generating a discussion between the works of John Rawls and Robert Nozick. Rawls believes that society should protect and help people and should use taxation as a method of doing this. Nozick believes we have three rights: Life, liberty and property. Any taxation of the state which is not used to ensure the protection of the first two breaks the third and should therefore be illegal and is immoral.

Rawls wants us to imagine how we would like society to be ordered, but he first wants us to imagine we don’t know what position we would have within that society. As a white, middle-class male I might find a certain way of doing things where women or blacks bore the brunt of the costs of society as fair. However, as a free-floating entity creating society from scratch and destined to be a part of it without knowing what part, would I be so happy with that arrangement? If I might be black then I’ll want a better deal for blacks. If I might be a woman I’ll want a better deal for women. Etc. So Rawls believes.

Nozick believes the state’s only legitimate role is that of protection of our rights. This is legitimately done through the police, to protect our rights against each other, and the army, to protect our rights against the people in other states. Any taxation not for these two purposes is theft and slavery. It’s the state demanding we work for them. If we are taxed at 25% above what it takes to finance the military and police, and we work 40 hours a week, then the state is enslaving us for 10 hours every week, in Nozick’s vision.

In my experience, most people agree with Nozick’s analysis of taxation and slavery, but want Rawls’ society… contradictory.

Exponential Growth

I have previously echoed Richard Heinberg’s question, are we smarter than yeast? I’ve also previously written about the problems of endless growth within a finite system. However, these seem to be two of the least popular (according to my Dashboard blog stats) of my entries. I asked myself why and it seems obvious. They don’t have a happy chapter.

Unlike many dire predictions about the fate of all of us if we don’t change our ways, I don’t believe there is a way to continue ‘business as usual’ and save the planet. A lot of the time we are told that if we just recycle then we’ll be fine. If we reduce and recycle we’ll be fine. If we reduce, reuse and recycle then we’ll be fine. If we reduce, reuse, recycle and invest heavily in renewable energy then we’ll be fine. Business as usual, no worries. Go back to sleep, we’ve got this one sorted.

Recycling requires energy and many, many things cannot be recycled forever. They stop being able to be turned into new things. Even the best recycling in the world will still require influxes of new stuff, new metals, new raw materials. It also takes lots of energy. Machines wear out and will need replacing. Parts break. These are the constants of life. We might make all of the wind turbines, solar cells, tidal barrages, geothermal turbines we need tomorrow, but that wouldn’t be the end of our resource use. We’d need to replace them as they broke. Even if we could get into a steady state with all of the resources we use being reused until they can no longer be reused, we still need more stuff. Even in a non-stone-age, ’steady-state’ society, there will still be the need for more stuff to be dug out and used.

This is assuming that the people who are investing in these things, the governments that are pushing them, the companies profiting from them, are abandoning growth. They’re not, of course. We can recycle, because it creates jobs, but we must grow. We can reuse to a point, but we must buy new as well, we must grow. We can reduce packaging, but not consumption, we must grow. We can invest in renewables, because that creates some jobs, but we must grow. We will invest in nuclear, because that creates tonnes of jobs, and we must grow. The economy must grow, or it will die. The implication of that statement is that the economy is more deserving of life than wild nature, or humans. The economy is master and we are its slaves. We are well-kept slaves (in the UK, US and other ‘Western democracies’, at least), but we are slaves.

As Derrick Jensen says, what we need are stories. Stories to tell our children, to warn them and educate them. Stories which will warn of the dangers of taking a steady state system and building from it a system based on growth. The stories will need to be better than just telling them they can’t do it, or appealing to the dictates of some deity or other. There will need to be a web of interconnected, self-supporting stories, a culture, which makes the thought of starting a growth based economy repugnant, insane. These stories will need to be supported by stories about the wonder of nature, its beauty and value. They will need to tell of the death of nature, massive, massive death, horrible death which a machine based on growth causes to priceless nature. They will have to make clear that the death causers also die from the very machine they use to cause the death. In short, they will have to be the exact opposite of the stories we now tell, of infinite growth being logical, necessary and good. They will also need to form the backbone of every culture in the world.

Every culture in the world will need the same core cultural stories because if any one decides that growth is okay, or good, then every other will fall before them. A growth based culture isn’t better because it wins cultural battles, it’s just more violent, more efficient at casting people onto the fire to fuel it. Its greed leads to its hegemony. Winning doesn’t make it right, it makes it repugnant.

Crunchy Crunchy

I’ve just read David Waddell’s very wise words over on his blog about whether debt is good, bad or ugly. He makes a lot of very sensible points about micro scale economics. In his example of Bob and his new sofas, for example, he’s entirely right that if Bob saved, rather than got his sofa on credit every time, he’d be able to buy more sofas in the long run. Bob doesn’t do this and the economy doesn’t encourage him to because of the very nature of our entire society. The short term is more important than the long term. Governments look no further than the next election. Businesses look no further than the next profit report. Individuals look no further than the next pay slip. There are exceptions to those rules, but generally people live pay slip to pay slip, saving and then spending their savings, putting a tiny amount into a pension and then regretting it in the long run. Businesses may have what they call a ‘long term plan’, but they’re usually only very sketchy beyond 5 years, and 5 years isn’t the long term. Governments are seen as over-stepping their legitimacy if they make too many policy decisions which run for more than their term in office. Etc, etc, etc.

Also, Waddell seems to ignore the fact that our currency is now debt. It’s not linked to anything more tangible than the debt we owe to the banks. If we stop borrowing or they stop lending then we’re in serious problems (hey… spooky). Because we can no longer be paid on demand the sum of £5 in gold, and instead are paid the sum of £5 in £s, we now need banks to keep providing easy to obtain debt and consumers to keep taking out more debt than they can easily finance. Bob may be better off if he figures out that saving will enable him to get more, or more expensive, sofas in the future, but for that to work as Bob intends it to work there needs to be enough other people who don’t realise it so the system keeps working and Bob’s money is still worth enough to buy him a sofa by the time he wants one.

He also overlooks the fact that the interest paid on loans made by the banks becomes available for re-lending. So a sea of consumers taking out loans is a good thing for lending as it generates interest which the banks can then lend out to more customers. Since the banks are able to lend many times what they actually have in reserves, and since the interest is theirs to keep, they can get a lot of money for lending from lending money.

It’s a brilliantly subtle system while it’s working. People believe the money they trade for goods and services is a unit of value. They believe it is worth something, because of that belief it is. If that belief disappears then the money they trade actually has no value at all. They can’t trade in the money at a bank for a thing which has value as a tradeable item such as gold, they can only trade in the money for different money. If they don’t accept the value of that money, where does that leave them? It’s in their best interests that they accept that the 1s and 0s in the bank’s computer which represents their wealth has value as they have no other recourse if they don’t. Belief is what holds the entire economic system together. That and the legal system deems it to be acceptable if someone will only offer to repay a debt they owe to you in the legal currency of the country you’re in, whether or not you believe in that currency’s value any more.

Waddell has a good point when it comes to the three phenomena of self-certification, 6 x mortgages and over 100% mortgages. However, once one accepts that money is debt (rather than value) and that the banks hoover up the money supply through interest payments, it becomes obvious why such things started to happen. The system needs larger and larger debts to finance the interest payments on the debt already in circulation.

There is a finite limit on what credit-worthy people can finance and are willing to finance. So they introduce self-certification to allow those who aren’t credit worthy to get into debt. Since this debt is secured against their house, which is going up in value, it doesn’t matter if they finance the debt or default, the bank makes money, the interest gets paid and the loan has created the money it needed to create for the system to work.

The banks lend money to everyone, even those who on paper can’t pay it back, and that fuels further increases in property prices, which helps the banks out because the defaulters’ homes are worth repossessing. Now, the increase in price starts to mean that people who should be able to finance a house can’t. So the bank increases the amount they will lend, because more people buying houses is good for them, both in interest payments and in house price inflation for future repossessions.

When you’re moving house there is almost always something you want to change about the house you’re moving to. Some small or not so small detail which is wrong. Now, if you’re having to give the vast majority of your pay to the bank so they’ll give you a 70 or 80% mortgage then you can’t make that change right away and may never get around to it. Many such changes will increase the value of the home, such as an extension. The bank wants your house to be worth as much as possible and so starts giving out 100% mortgages, so you can spend that 20% you’d saved on your extensions and remodelling. Lovely. However, word gets around that the banks are now giving 100% mortgages, so people stop saving that 20% and just want their house. The banks still want the house to increase in value by the addition of extentions and remodelling, so they up the percent they will loan to the borrower in the hopes that the excess will be used to increase the value of their home or buy some other retrieveable goods. If the mortgage is financed the bank gets its share. If not then its gets its share by repossession. This works so long as the price of houses is going up.

The reality is so stupid that it seems almost impossible that it would be allowed to continue. A bank shouldn’t be allowed to loan out almost $100,000 on a starting capital of only $1111.12 (part two of Money As Debt), but in effect they can. They can have $1111.12 and collect interest on almost $100,000.

The current credit crunch (God I hate that it got called that) was obviously going to happen. The system makes it inevitable. If we have the fossil fuel energy reserves left to claw our way out of the huge hole we’re in then it will happen again, unless we change the way banks and loans operate. We wont change a thing though because we like the illusion of prosperity that the system creates. We like to buy things today that we can’t afford until next year/decade. We like to have businesses able to operate despite losing £75 million in one financial year. We like these things and these things are what the system provides. There is so little real incentive to change the system that it wont be changed. I can even imagine post-crash societies which still operate this type of credit system. We’re short term animals. We like the benefits today and don’t care if it hurts tomorrow. We like it even more when the benefits are today and the pain might not be felt until after we die (see the way we treat the environment, the problems looming with peak oil and the lack of action, etc).

Vote For X!

Democracy, a wonderful thing. We are told this without end from the moment we’re really able to ask the questions. We are introduced to ‘our team’ by our parents. We’re told all the ways ‘our team’ is better than ‘the other team’ and therefore why we should support them. Our team. It’s like football. You support your home team because of whatever reason you choose and you back them to the hilt because that’s the only way you know how.

If your team does something you don’t agree with then, more often than not, you blame that thing on a portion of the team, the scape goats of the team, and life goes on. Your team is still your team, you just wish they’d get rid of all those goats. Then it’d be perfect.

Doesn’t matter which team you support either, this will probably be the way you vote. There are a very small number of swing voters. Voters who don’t treat politics like a giant and very long game of football. But are swing voters really any better than supporters? Swing voters tend between the two main parties, the home or away side. They don’t think, “Hang on a second, not four years ago I was actually for the other side and switched because of a, b and c. Maybe I should look for something else?” No, they go on flicking from Red to Blue Corporate Party, thinking that they’re making a difference.

I’m here to tell you that both left and right wing are attached to the same tired old bird.

Democracy doesn’t work. It relies on uninformed, illeducated, selfish, bitter people to be right most of the time. Taxes are essential for the multitude of things we expect from the government, yet if you put it to the vote, most people would vote down taxes. It would be ‘right’ within the democratic system. The government would then scramble to provide the things that people were still shouting for without the money to provide those things. If, after a few years of this, you were to ask people if they want more or less taxation, they’d again vote for less. They’d ignore the fact that they’d been moaning just a week before about the absense of services from the government and vote with their selfishness.

Civilisation is the bird. It has restricted the choices we have to its left or right wings. Civilisation believes itself capable of flying, but it’s falling.

I’m waiting for the people to start saying that the current financial disaster was unforeseeable. Like they did with the New Orleans levy. Like they did with the Iraqi civil war. It will be on every news network and the good little journos wont point to all of the voices who were crying out against the way we were doing business, just as they didn’t point out the numerous studies into the levy system, just like they didn’t point out the opinions that were bang on the money about the way the Iraq situation would develop.

Vote no one. No one is worth your vote.

What About People Breathing?! Part II

Having read the FAQ page for COyou2, and having seen the side pannel of on of their pages advertising COyou2 Petz, I am almost certain this is supposed to be a spoof or satirical website, possibly even some kind of study in how amazingly stupid people can be.

I am unsure if there is actually a product to be bought. I am a little wary of providing my name and e-mail details. After all, I’d not sign a book which had “signitories of this book are morons” at the top of the page, and that does seem to be the implication of ordering a catalogue.

“The fact is that big businesses simply can’t afford to make the same sacrifices we can as individuals. We rely on them to make the huge profits that keep our economies alive. [...] BHP recently committed 0.2 per cent of their net annual profit to reduce its emissions and now reimburses its staff for half the cost of energy-efficient light bulbs in their home!” – FAQ page for COyou2

I don’t rely on them to make huge profits, and neither does anyone else. Some people may rely on them to make reasonable, sustained profits, but huge profits are what they want, not what is relied on. It’s also not desireable. Huge profits means huge exploitation. Reasonable profits imply reasonable exploitation, sure, and I’m not supporting that, simply pointing out that some people think it’s good.

I personally don’t think that 0.2% of their profits being devoted to reducing emissions is actually worthy of an exclamation mark. I think it’s worthy of derission and ridicule for being a pathetic and lousy amount. 0.2% is possibly as low a figure as they could possibly make it while still having the money actually buy anything at all. 0.2% is possibly even a government mandated amount.

Like beauracracies, the economy started as a tool for the use of people but has expanded to become something people are supposed to be enslaved to. We can’t possibly ask companies to not exploit people, because of the economy. The economy is more important than those people. We can’t possibly ask companies to take realistic, decisive, sustained action to prevent anything, because it might be bad for the economy. The economy is more important than animals or humans or the planet we live on. We can’t do anything to change anything if the change has even the slightest negative impact on the economy, because the economy is too important for us to risk anything happening to it. The Earth, on the other hand, that can be sacreficed at every turn, at ever step, because it’s not the economy and we don’t rely on it. Right? … Right?

Mankind lived for hundreds of thousands of years without economies. We wouldn’t last a year without the biosphere that supports us. But, maybe the economy is like Pandora’s box and can’t possibly be closed? Once it’s there it’s too important to lose? Once we have an economy, we no longer need biodiversity in our biosphere, because the economy replaces it?

Nope, the economy should be a tool. We should treat it as something to serve us, not something we must serve. It should have always been setup as such, but for some reason[1], we’re slaves to it and that is the way it is designed. The discourse of our society doesn’t even acknowledge the possibility that the economy is a tool. The economy is alive and hungry, and must be fed. It only eats lives, they’re cheap, right?

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[1] A reason that’s not too hard to work out, honestly. Power, those with it wanting to keep it.

What About People Breathing?!

So, I recently got directed to this site. Basicly it’s a ‘new innovation’ aimed at one of the ‘major emitters’ of CO2. Breathing!

As the site hypes, each of us are responsible for approximately 1 kg of CO2 per day, 0.38 tons a year! Multiplied by 6.7 billion, the site tells us, and you have a lot of CO2 being emitted. Now, I’m all for population reduction, as anyone who has read my blog will no doubt be aware. However, saying we need to be responsible for capturing our own breath with some gadget is just ludicrous.

1 kg of CO2 per day to continue to exist? I think we can afford that one, thanks. 700,000+ kg of CO2 from one company’s unhealthy snack foods per day?[1] That we can live without. The CO2 emitted by short-haul flights we can live without. The CO2 emitted by long distance commuters we can live without. Breathing is actually vital.

COyou2’s little device is such a waste of effort that I can’t imagine it being for real. I looked at the site and my first thoughts were “Oh, satire, how cute.” However, some people seem to be taking it seriously, so I’m worried that they’re actually a real company selling actual products to retards. Even if one were to accept that the CO2 from breathing were a problem worthy of innovation, this device doesn’t look comfortable. It would be a gadget which you might use once or twice and then just leave alone. Almost certainly causing a net increase in CO2 emissions.

I think one of the major gripes I have with the site is the contained implication that governments and business are doing all they possibly can, so much so that your pesky breathing is now a big enough contribution to CO2 emissions that you’re irresponsible for not capturing your own CO2. As if any part of that were even skirting the truth, or could even see truth with a high powered telescope.

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[1] Walkers’ crisps, a UK based company, sells over 10 million bags of crisps per day, each bag responsible for twice its weight in CO2 emissions.

Legal Aid

Legal aid cases have never actually been the plum cases. A barrister has, for a very long time, been able to get substantially more money from doing jobs other than legal aid jobs, because of restrictions placed on the pay awards by the government. However, a lot of them saw the benefit of doing legal aid work and so did it alongside their ordinary practice since it is essential in our legal system that people should have adequate representation in court in order to defend themselves.

Laws as so complicated, the interactions between laws especially, that trained legal assistance is necessary in almost all legal matters. Because they are necessary and their job difficult to get into, they are able to charge a premium. Add to that the Labour government’s ability to pass laws like they are going out of fashion and you have a situation where more laws are on the books so more offences are being committed and so more representation is needed. The legal aid pool doesn’t grow in a concurrent way and so less money is available each year for each case.

Barristers operate a ‘cab rank’ principle, the first barrister available takes the case. They can only turn down a case if the fee is not sufficient for the task they are being asked to perform (or if it contradics their moral or ethical code). In a recent case that was abandoned because no barrister would take it the reason was because, once they’d added up the number of hours they would have had to put into the case and divided it by the “generous” amount they were offered for the legal aid job, they were expected to do the work at a rate of around £4 an hour, less than minimum wage.

Legal aid is vital. Cutting it is like admitting we don’t actually give a damn about justice (I know we don’t, but lets not be so brazen about admitting it, please?) or the right to a fair trial. We have trial by media anyway. There’s no smoke without fire! We cry foul when people are found not guilty because we are so certain they were, the papers and news told us they were guilty, so they must have been.

I’m sure the CEOs of major corporations would be thrilled if you said to them, “Right, while you make this product, rather than being paid 400 times the average wage of your workers in the UK (3000 times the wages you pay in a lot of the poorest countries), how about you get paid the same?”

As an aside, is the job a CEO does really worth 400 times that of the people on the bottom of the ladder? Really? If the CEO took the day off, would that impact the state of the company the same way as 400 average workers taking the day off would? No, so he’s not adding the same level of value as 400 workers. If the CEO stopped doing his job, would it take 400 standard workers to replace him? No, so he’s not doing a job so big he would need to be replaced that much. If he decided to work an extra day’s worth of work, does the companies profits sky rocket? No, so he’s not actually adding much value at all. It strikes me that CEOs have managed to create this club where they get astonishing levels of pay for a level of work that isn’t concurrent with the value they add to the company. If CEOs have to fire a handful of people to cut costs they should be made to take a 5% pay cut as well. In many big companies that 5% pay cut would be the same as getting rid of 20 people. There is nothing a CEO, a footballer, an F1 driver, etc does that is worth that level of money.

Nuclear Power: The Answer?

I’ve read it over and over again. I have heard it time and time again. “Nuclear power is the answer!”

I want to just say at the start here: If you have arrieved at nuclear power as the answer, then you’re asking totally the wrong question.

Nuclear power is arguably even more dramatically wrong than squeezing out the last drops of oil, coal and gas from the planet and burning them all. Although one could form a strong argument that enslavement and potential explosions from fissile material stored incorrectly aren’t as bad as mass extinctions, mass starvation and billions of climate change refugees.

The end product from the nuclear process is horrific. Really horrific. It not only requires intensely specialist skills and equipment to deal with safely due to it’s deadly-dangerous, few-seconds-exposure-and-dead-on-the-spot nature, but it also requires long term care. Thousands of years after we have made use of the last dibble of power possible from the nuclear process our descendents will be training nuclear waste management professionals to deal with the waste of a process they’ve never benefited from.

Nuclear power is slavery. The master (each of us) takes the good stuff (the power) and the enslaved (our children and our children’s children) pay for it with sweat and danger and never see any reward. They are forced to taking care of the cheque because the cost of not doing so is higher still.

One of the larger myths is that you can simply pack radioactive waste up and hide it away harmlessly. You can’t. One major reason is that it’s still capable of creating a very powerful explosion if the containers are not separated properly. The separators degrade as they absorb the radioactivity (as is their job) and must be replaced, so you can’t just leave it all and go ‘ho hum, that’s sorted then’. Also we have to keep a lot of the waste in pools of cooled water, which means that energy produced by future generations has already been ear-marked for use on something we have extracted all of the benefit from.

The injustice makes it hard to fathom. How we treat our descendents at the moment is shocking. It would be many scales of magnitude worse if we not only sucked the fossil fuels dry but then also hacked out the uranium and used it all up as well. Every structure which supports our way of life is based on short terms, quarterly profits, yearly profits, the next election or our five year aim. None of it even thinks about the long term. No company is going to stop making their vast profits today because of damage that they’re doing if they can externalise the cost of dealing with that damage. The nuclear power industry does this. They don’t have to deal with their own waste out of their own pocket because they know they just need to hold the country they’re in to ransom. You deal with it, we’re done. If you don’t then, well, you don’t really want to know what then.

The nuclear process is not clean, don’t for a second believe anyone who tells you that it is. In fact, I have taken to laughing in the face of anyone who says that to me in person. The process releases various gases that are much more potent as greenhouse gases than carbon dioxide and some of which degrade over time into carbon dioxide, so you get a surge of high power greenhouse gas followed by a sustained period of less potent greenhouse gas. It also uses oil in the process of mining, processing and transportation.

And to those who might suggest thorium as a less nasty way of generating nuclear power than uranium I have this to say:

* We have no thorium reactors in the world that currently work as the theory intends. There a couple that have been shown can potentially work, possibly, maybe, but they are not being used as thorium reactors, they are being used as normal reactors because the thorium reaction process has a great many bugs to solve before it is commercially viable. Indeed, it is arguable whether it is possible to actually make it commercially viable at all.

* Thorium reactors take a long time to get up and running. A long time. From my research it’s time measured in decades. So even if we were to decide on thorium reactors we may not have time from our current energy sources to actually get enough reactors up and running and make the change over smooth.

* Thorium still produces deadly-dangers, long-lived end products. They are still deadly to anyone who spends a hand full of seconds in their presence and they still require the enslavement of future generations into waste management. Nothing you can do will change that, it’s a fact of the process.

* Finally the maths do not make sense. There is quite a lot of thorium available, which is its major attraction. There’s many times more thorium available than there is uranium. However, if you take into account the whole fuel cycle, from construction of the reactor, to processing the raw material, to safe storage of the end product, to deconstruction and safe storage of the radioactive elements of the reactor at the end of its life, the whole process uses more energy than it makes. If you start to put into the equation the harder to access thorium then it’s many orders of magnitude worse. Indeed, some of the proposed thorium fuel sources require more energy to mine and process than they produce, not even considering every other stage of the fuel cycle.

The reason we are likely to get nuclear power is that it creates many more jobs than renewables do. Sorage and management of the waste employs people, the nuclear power plant employs people, the transportation system required to bring the mined and processed material to the plant employs people, the mining and processing employs people. Maintainance of the wind turbine/solar grid/barrage/etc employs people, transporting the parts employs people, producing the components employs people. I think this quick comparison shows the difference in the number of employees necessary in each process. Shipping parts in the renewable process isn’t steady like shipping the mined and processed fuel is in the nuclear process. Maintaining the fields of units doesn’t require as many people as maintaining and running a complex power plant. Etc.

Nuclear power also has a much more powerful lobbying body, as there is (arguably) much more money to be made in the short term (the only term that matters in capitalist society as can be easily seen from the fact that we even have to discuss nuclear power).

And as a final thought, the tailings from the mining processes for all forms of nuclear reactor technology are themselves poisonous (as are the tailings from all mining operations, but radioactive tailings have an added kick) and are allowed to sit around so they can pollute rivers and other sources of water. The mining companies have promised to fill in the mines after they have finished with clay and the tailings they have extracted, but have yet to actually do this anywhere.

The framing of the discourse of our mass media makes it so most people don’t know enough to arrive at the right questions. The discourse is such that these questions don’t actually make it into the core premise of the reporting, leaving people with nothing but the wrong questions and thus the wrong answer. If every time someone suggested nuclear power as an alternative they were made to explain their position on the enslavement of future generations there might be some sensible debates. If every time someone suggested we need to secure our energy supplies and so need to build nuclear power plants they were asked how relying on other countries (since the UK has no uranium of its own to mine and use) is securing our energy supplies, we might have a sensible debate on the matter. If every person who suggests nuclear power were faced with the impossible to answer questions, the impossible to ignore reality, there might be hope for us.

We’re living on a very windy, wave battered island. We should make use of that. NIMBYs should be given a choice, wind power or no power. Neither isn’t an option, unless they want to disconnect their electricity supply they should be forced to accept that some places are windier than others, some places are better sites for wind farms and so some places must lead the way and have those farms built. We need some form of energy and we need to all take it on ourselves to see that the energy we get is as sane and responsible as possible.

Wage Inequality

Capitalist society is fueled by wage inequality. It’s the main glue that holds the whole mess together. Not only because it allows those with the majority of the wealth to dictate how things go and thus keep themselves in possession of the majority of the wealth, but also because it acts as a very attractive carrot.

We all know the Local Boy Comes Good story. It’s one of the most fundamental stories of civilisation. It teaches us that, if we only work ‘hard’ enough then we too can join those with the majority of the wealth. This story keeps people content to earn a fraction of top CEOs because, they believe, they too have a chance to earn disgusting levels of income. However, the vast majority of people who are earning seven figure sums have parents who earn such figures. Old money, it’s called. The major deciding factor isn’t the results you have but the place you got those results. If you have Eton and Oxford/Cambridge on your CV that’s what’s important.

Interestingly, what they seem to mean by ‘work hard’ is ‘willing to plunder, abuse and exploit for profit’. There are very few (if any) large companies which have clean records. Most have been fined for breaking the law when it was profitable to do so. Many have factories in developing countries where they can employ children for less than it costs to have three meals a day and work them for 72 hours a week. If hard work truly brought with it the rewards we are supposed to believe it does then these children should have the majority of the wealth. However, they don’t. They can barely afford to feed and house themselves and are forced into working because their parents can’t make enough money for them not to work. Companies get fat and profitable by exploiting such children and supporting the repressive regime which allows them to beat their employees and fire them when they reach 16.

When scandals like those conscerning Enron hit we are always assured that those responsible are just a couple of ‘bad apples’, and that the vast majority of businesses are honest. This is demonstrably not true, all you need do is look at the fines imposed on companies for breaking the law to see that the majority of them will break the law so long as the cost analysis shows it to be more profitable. Edward Norton’s job in Fight Club is the kind of thing I am talking about.

“A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.” – ‘Jack’ The Narrator, Fight Club 1999.

Now, I’m not saying that Norton’s quote above is factually accurate, I can believe it, but I don’t know if there is actually a specific person who does that. However, such cost analysis are done all the time, is it cheaper to pay people damages or to recall this or that line, is it cheaper to abide by fair competition laws or is it cheaper to say to hell with them and absorb the fine, is it cheaper to pay for the licensed loggers to go into the Amazon and cut the limited amount of wood the Brazilian authorities allows, or is it cheaper not to ask where the wood came from and thus buy it from illegal loggers who have no right to cut down trees? So long as option A is more expensive than option B, we take option B, that it’s illegal or not is moot.

Another story we are often told is that if we don’t like what a company is doing we can vote with our feet, hit them in the wallet where it hurts, and make them change their minds. We are supposed to hear this and accept that it is fair. However, this is about as unfair as you can get. Our voting system operates on one man one vote because that is the fairest way to run a system to give everyone an equal share of the power. Voting with your feet is totaly unfair, because it gives Joe Bigbucks many times more votes than Norman Nocash. Joe, by virtue of having more money is a more attractive customer to the company and so is the one they target with their advertising. Norman is the same age and gender as Joe and is interested in all the same things, however because he is poor he isn’t the target audience of the companies advertising and the company doesn’t care what he thinks. So long as Joe is happy to shop there ther company doesn’t mind if Norman never comes throgh their doors again, he could neve buy much even when he did.

Voting with our feet is a fantastic story for the rich to tell. Invariably, those unhappy with the status quo are those who are not benefiting from it. Those who benefit from the status quo (or feel they do by being able to afford McMansions, Hummers, SUVs, etc) are often very content with it. Activists are normally those who are fed up of being stepped on by the system, not always, but mostly. I’ll grant you that most of the activists in support of fox hunting were no where near the bread-line. As a result of this, more often than not the people who care what a company is doing in Nicaragua, the Philippines, etc and want to change it aren’t the ones with a lots of feet votes. But, because they buy the voting with your feet story they are happy to register their displeasure by staying at home and not shopping with the company, despite never really having shopped there in the past and not having any plans to shop there in the future. The story works as an excellent way to keep the number of people who think direct action protests are the answer to our collective problems to a minimum.

People sitting at home watching the TV are even easier to ignore.