July 2007
Monthly Archive
July 23, 2007
The venerable Brit scientist and creator of the Gaia theory James Lovelock is a strong proponent of nuclear energy. He sees reactor power as the sole viable alternative to fossil fuel energy in existence today. Lovelock, however, also sees the best long-term hope for mankind in a developing form of nuclear energy, fusion reaction.
“Along with many other scientists throughout the world, I knew that nuclear fusion energy, the nuclear combustion of hydrogen, was the ultimate clean ad everlasting energy source, mainly because we knew that this was what empowered the sun and other stars. Most of us still thought that we were a long way from realizing fusion in practice. It just seemed impossible that the conditions inside the core of the sun, with temperatures over 100 million degrees, could be arranged here on Earth on a practical scale as part of a power station.
But in February 2005 the director of the Culham Science Centre, Professor Sir Christopher Llewellyn Smith, invited Sandy and me to visit and view their Tokomak reactor, and to learn about their recent experiences using it and the prospects for fusion energy. We were amazed and delighted to discover that their fusion reactor had proved itself by sustaining for two seconds a nuclear flame that burnt deuterium and tritium, isotopes of hydrogen, and generated sixteen megawatts of energy.
As a scientist I was intrigued by the thought that there in front of me was a large toroidal flask within which temperatures far above those of the hottest part of the sun’s core had been sustained for a couple of seconds. The temperature of the burning mix of hydrogen isotopes was 150 million degrees.
The deuterium fuel used for fusion energy is unlimited in availability. It constitutes 0.016 per cent of water and is easy to extract [while the fusion reaction itself produces tritium].
The nuclear waste of a fusion reactor is the harmless non-radioactive gas helium, and there are no long-term radioactive wastes. The metal parts of the reactor become mildly radioactive as a consequence of the neutron flux, but this is a minor disposal problem.
Noting that France is about to build the next large thermonuclear reactor which will be producing power for that country’s grid, Lovelock lamented the failure to back Kyoto: If Kyoto had been influenced more by the pragmatism of scientists and engineers and less by romantic idealism, we might soon have harvested fusion energy. As it is, even given good will, it may take twenty more years before it begins to heat our electric kettles or run our word processors.
Which brings us to Vancouver and General Fusion Inc. which has already lab tested its own hot-fusion device and is now raising capital to produce a prototype fusion reactor. General Fusion is developing a patent-pending technology, MTF fusion, which it hopes to turn into a prototype reactor by 2010. Let’s hope it succeeds but, even then, it would probably take at least another decade before fusion power became a significant contributor to our power grid.
July 23, 2007
No Sally, the Three Wise Men only show up at Christmas!
July 23, 2007
You can scream, you can shout, you can howl at the moon – but you cannot escape the fact that, in the era of the Cheney monarchy, Canada is firmly under Washington’s spell. The American foreign policy of “you’re either with us or you’re against us” has demanded a yielding of some sovereignty. Today, America’s enemies become our enemies, even if we don’t declare them that in so many words. In everything from fisheries to softwood lumber we bend to America’s often capricious will. That’s why Canadians – you and me – have an immediate and vested interest in the goings on in Washington that we’ve never had to shoulder before.
Churning through these thoughts I was reminded of an article I’d read in the June issue of Harper’s that explored what America faces in undoing the damage of the Bush/Cheney regime. One aspect examined was the need to undo the climate of fear and cowardice inculcated in the American people and their government:
We abhor cowardice and revere courage in part for the good courage does the rest of our character. In Ancient Greece it was one of the four cardinal virtues, along with temperance, prudence and justice, none of which can be found in either the Bush Administration or the majority of the Congress. …one can say with some certainty that a fearful person is unlikely to be temperate, prudent or just. It is reasonable to think that as courage improves the moral character of a person or a government, fear worsens it.
Cutting taxes for the rich and adding billions to the national debt is not prudent. Leaving millions of people, many of them children, in dire poverty in the richest nation in the history of the world is not just. Silencing the press is not temperate, nor is secret surveillance of the citizenry. Failing to put an end to an unjust war because one is afraid, like the Democrats, of repercussions at the polls is anything but courageous.
…The word “virtue” in either the Greek or Christian sense, does not apply to the Bush administration or to many of its cohorts in Congress. some of our representatives now lie, others accept bribes, at least one abused children, many participate in fixing elections, and then there is the war. The result has been an American decline so precipitous it may not be reversed for generations, if ever.
…We have become brave in answering pollsters and timid in pursuing action. …It is a comfort of sorts to think that the disposition to evil is limited to the Bush Administration and its followers in the legislature, but there is an itch in that idea. Bush and his minions were reelected in 2004. Could there have been any cause for that but fear? And would this country have turned against him if the prediction of his court of fools had been correct and the invasion and occupation had been “a piece of cake”?
The final question is compelling. We take comfort in polls revealing that a majority of Americans now consider the conquest of Iraq to have been unjustified but how much of that enlightenment arises from the fact that Iraq has turned into a disaster? I suspect our comfort is an illusion.
A year ago I wrote of the final line of the American national anthem, the part where it describes the United States as the “land of the free and the home of the brave”. It struck me at the time that neither can exist without the other – no bravery without freedom and certainly no freedom without bravery. And yet we see in this incomparably wealthy and powerful nation, a climate of fear and even a willing surrender of freedoms.
July 23, 2007
George w. Bush and his ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Cocker, try to put a very positive spin on the mess they’ve created in that country. Cocker’s real assessment was apparent in a cable he sent to the Bush administration, a copy of which fell into the hands of the Washington Post.
The cable calls for all Iraqis currently working for the US to be given refugee status. Cocker warns that without the promise of safe haven in America, the Iraqi employees will quit.
It seems the Iraqis in the employ of the American occupation are under no illusions about how well it’s all going.
July 23, 2007
CNN will tonight host a Democratic all-candidates debate in which the questions will be coming from YouTube users. YouTube received 2,300 video questions from the American public from which CNN will chose around 30.
A lot of bloggers are disappointed that CNN gets to filter the questions, seeing it as a form of censorship. Then again, CNN is airing the debate and the procedure is somewhat novel.
The candidates have been given a “heads up” on at least one question they’ll face. From The Guardian:
Among them is a 30-second clip from a cancer survivor who removes her wig and says her chances of survival are not as good as they would have been if she had had health insurance.
“What would you, as president, do to make low-cost or free preventative medicine available for everyone in this country?” she asks.
I’m not sure this is as big a deal as CNN would suggest. After all, candidates often subject themselves to open-line radio where the questions from callers are a lot more spontaneous than the YouTube project.
July 23, 2007
When it comes to issues like free trade, globalization and de-regulation, a lot of time, money and effort has gone into ensuring we’re thoroughly indoctrinated in our views. Tariffs? They’re bad, aren’t they? Isn’t that why we joined the World Trade Organization? Free Trade, Globalization? A rising tide floats all boats, eh? De-regulation? Open marketplace, competition – right?
These pitches all rely on the same thing – assumptions. We assume that tariffs are always bad, that they lead to bottlenecks in the trade of goods that injures both sides of the deal. In the course of assuming that we assume away the social, political and economic utility of tariffs. I know, we haven’t actually done away with tariffs but we’re certainly marching down that road.
De-regulation was the cause celebre of the Mulroney/Thatcher/Reagan cabal. In Canada, the Mulroney Tories de-regulated the airline industry and our two, flag carriers which then competed themselves into oblivion until there was but one and even it had to struggle its way through bankruptcy proceedings. Canadian Pacific swallowed up Pacific Western Airlines and the once-magnificent Wardair; changed its name to Canadian Airlines International; began hemorrhaging money as it gradually collapsed under its own weight; tried to rescue itself by grabbing Air Canada – and then died to be swallowed up by the same Air Canada it had targeted. And just how well did that de-regulated coup d’etat work out for Air Canada? We all know the answer to that, especially anyone who flew Air Canada during those miserable days.
Sometimes the absence of regulation in an industry is simply unhealthy. Sometimes the central government has a role to play in regulating industries that goes beyond health and environmental issues. In today’s New York Times, columnist and economist Paul Krugman examines how de-regulation caused America to lose its lead in high-speed internet connectivity:
The numbers are startling. As recently as 2001, the percentage of the population with high-speed access in Japan and Germany was only half that in the United States. In France it was less than a quarter. By the end of 2006, however, all three countries had more broadband subscribers per 100 people than we did.
Even more striking is the fact that our “high speed” connections are painfully slow by other countries’ standards. According to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, French broadband connections are, on average, more than three times as fast as ours. Japanese connections are a dozen times faster. Oh, and access is much cheaper in both countries than it is here.
As a result, we’re lagging in new applications of the Internet that depend on high speed. France leads the world in the number of subscribers to Internet TV; the United States isn’t even in the top 10.
What happened to America’s Internet lead? Bad policy. Specifically, the United States made the same mistake in Internet policy that California made in energy policy: it forgot — or was persuaded by special interests to ignore — the reality that sometimes you can’t have effective market competition without effective regulation.
…when the Bush administration put Michael Powell in charge of the F.C.C., the digital robber barons were basically set free to do whatever they liked. As a result, there’s little competition in U.S. broadband — if you’re lucky, you have a choice between the services offered by the local cable monopoly and the local phone monopoly. The price is high and the service is poor, but there’s nowhere else to go.
Meanwhile, as a recent article in Business Week explains, the real French bureaucrats used judicious regulation to promote competition. As a result, French consumers get to choose from a variety of service providers who offer reasonably priced Internet access that’s much faster than anything I can get, and comes with free voice calls, TV and Wi-Fi.
It’s too early to say how much harm the broadband lag will do to the U.S. economy as a whole. But it’s interesting to learn that health care isn’t the only area in which the French, who can take a pragmatic approach because they aren’t prisoners of free-market ideology, simply do things better.
July 22, 2007
The idea has been bandied about before – go after the Taliban insurgents and al-Qaeda terrorists in their lairs inside Pakistan. It’s an option George w. Bush himself brought up this week. It’s a decision that also could have enormous ramifications, the sort that the frat boy Bush has repeatedly shown himself unwilling to grasp until it’s too late.
Richard Nixon did it. He sent his military forces swarming into Cambodia to attack the safe havens of the North Vietnamese army infiltrators. He kicked proper hell out of the place, killed an awful lot of civilians, and maybe bought himself a year’s grace before the inevitable.
The idea is the same but the turf is not and neither are the people our side would have to deal with, the Pashtun. It’s sort of like putting a bare foot into a bag full of scorpions. You’re going to get stung, it’ll hurt like hell and it might even kill you. Chances are good, when it’s over, you’ll realize you made a huge mistake.
The Toronto Sun’s Eric Margolis has travelled through these lands and he knows better:
I spent a remarkable time in this wild medieval region during the 1980s and ’90s, travelling alone where even Pakistani government officials dared not go, visiting the tribes of Waziristan, Orakzai, Khyber, Chitral, and Kurram, and their chiefs, called “maliks.”
These tribal belts are always called “lawless.” Pashtun tribesmen could shoot you if they didn’t like your looks. Rudyard Kipling warned British Imperial soldiers over a century ago, when fighting cruel, ferocious Pashtun warriors of the Afridi clan, “save your last bullet for yourself.”
…there is law: The traditional Pashtun tribal code, Pashtunwali, that strictly governs behaviour and personal honour. Protecting guests was sacred. I was captivated by this majestic mountain region and wrote of it extensively in my book, War at the Top of the World.
The 40 million Pashtun — called “Pathan’ by the British — are the world’s largest tribal group. Imperial Britain divided them by an artificial border, the Durand Line, now the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Pakistan’s Pashtun number 28 million, plus an additional 2.5 million refugees from Afghanistan. The 15 million Pashtun of Afghanistan form that nation’s largest ethnic group.
The tribal agency’s Pashtun reluctantly joined Pakistan in 1947 under express constitutional guarantee of total autonomy and a ban on Pakistani troops entering there.
But under intense U.S. pressure, President Pervez Musharraf violated Pakistan’s constitution by sending 80,000 federal troops to fight the region’s tribes, killing 3,000 of them.
In best British imperial tradition, Washington pays Musharraf $100 million monthly to rent his sepoys (native soldiers) to fight Pashtun tribesmen.
As a result, Pakistan is fast edging towards civil war.
The anti-communist Taliban movement is part of the Pashtun people. Taliban fighters move across the artificial Pakistan-Afghanistan border, to borrow a Maoism, like fish through the sea. Osama bin Laden is a hero in the region.
Bush/Cheney & Co. do not understand that while they can rent President Musharraf’s government in Islamabad, many Pashtun value personal honour far more than money, and cannot be bought.
Any U.S. attack on Pakistan would be a catastrophic mistake.
Margolis (quite correctly in my opinion) argues that carrying the fighting into Pakistan will only widen the war and transform it into a battle against western occupation. Think Iraq. Secondly, he points out that Musharraf’s fate lies in the hands of his army’s officers who may topple the general in response to US or NATO attacks. His third point is that this tactic could reignite the movement for a unified Pashtun homeland, Pashtunistan, that could fatally undermine the modern Pakistan state which, in case you need reminding, has a troublesome nuclear arsenal. Lastly he notes the US military has a mixed record from taking on what were, at best, weak and small opponents – such as Iraq. Pakistan, with its half-million soldier military, could well be much more than the US and NATO could handle.
Those Bush administration and Harper government officials who foolishly advocate attacking Pakistan are playing with fire.
July 22, 2007
So, Stephen Harper’s approval rating has fallen to 29% in the latest Angust Reid poll. Yippee! Well, not quite. Our own Stephane Dion’s numbers aren’t even half Harpo’s. The Liberal leader tallies a whopping 14% approval. 21% of respondents say their opinion of Dion has worsened over the past four weeks.
Stephane, the holiday is over. The only reason Harper is even floating at 29% is because there’s no Liberal leader taking the fight to him.
Dion, it’s time to decide. Either lead or leave.
July 22, 2007
Gaia is an evolutionary system in which any species,
including humans, that persists with changes to
the environment that lessen the survival of its
progeny is doomed to extinction.
We have in a sense stumbled into a war with
Gaia, a war that we have no hope of winning.
All that we can do is make peace while we are
still strong and not a broken rabble.
Chances are that, when it comes to global warming, you’re more familiar with names like George Monbiot than that of James Lovelock.
Lovelock is a classic British boffin. He’s a brilliant old man with a refreshingly young mind that seamlessly blends abject pessimism with inspirational optimism through the application of a lifetime of science and rigorous logic.
Long before word of global warming filtered down to any of us, Lovelock originated the “Gaia Hypothesis.” Put simply, and probably somewhat inaccurately, it pictures the earth as a living thing. It’s not that Lovelock has fanciful notions that rocks and water and air are animate. What he does contend is that the earth acts as though it were animate, a living thing. It self-regulates its biosphere and, when it gets sick, it gets a fever.
The Gaia Theory took a long time to gain the acceptance of the scientific community. At first about a third of it was accepted, the rest considered too futuristic and unproven. Year by year the balance of it was borne out by events. It’s still a theory but one that now has the backing of consensus.
The theory isn’t just about global warming (or “global heating” in Lovelock’s words) but about the overall impact of humanity on the biosphere and what we must do about it.
“The Revenge of Gaia” is a genuinely worthwhile read. Check it out.
July 22, 2007
Nicolas Sarkozy doesn’t mince words: “I am not a theoretician. I am not an ideologue. Oh, I am not an intellectual! I am someone concrete!”
Sarkozy’s message extends to his cabinet. The nation of Descartes and Jean Paul Sartre thinks way too much. His Finance Minister, Christine Lagarde, recently advised the French to abandon their “old national habit.” From the New York Times:
“France is a country that thinks,” she told the National Assembly. “There is hardly an ideology that we haven’t turned into a theory. We have in our libraries enough to talk about for centuries to come. This is why I would like to tell you: Enough thinking, already. Roll up your sleeves.”
Bernard-Henri Lévy, the much more splashy philosopher-journalist who wrote a book retracing Tocqueville’s 19th-century travels throughout the United States, is similarly appalled by Ms. Lagarde’s comments.
“This is the sort of thing you can hear in cafe conversations from morons who drink too much,” said Mr. Lévy, who is so well-known in French that he is known simply by his initials B.H.L. “To my knowledge this is the first time in modern French history that a minister dares to utter such phrases.”
I’m just trying to remember. Haven’t we all had to deal with another anti-intellectual government over the past seven years? Apeople who stopped thinking and questioning and focused on “doing” especially doing what they were told. That leader – something to do with cowboys and polyps, eh? How well has that country fared since it went anti-intellectual?
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