November newsletter - True or False

This month we had a True or False policy quiz.

We asked which of the following has NOT happened since our last newsletter.

• The pope endorsed condom use
• The Prime Minister announced an extra Bank Holiday on my birthday
• The government introduced rising block tariffs, a Lib Dem election promise

The answer of course is the last statement is the false one: Rising block tariffs were promised by Nick Clegg in the election debates, but this eminently sensible policy has yet to see the light of day.

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What's it worth to turn off the escalators?

Today I passed through City Thameslink tube station at around 11am. There was nobody else there, but the escalators were all running. It made me think, shouldn't these all be on a stop-start system so they only run when people are there to go up and down them?

Here's the math. If you could stop all escalators on the tube from running 25% of the time, you would offset the CO2 produced by about 750 houses.

For comparison, if you wanted to provide renewable electricity for 750 houses, you'd need something like the micro hydro station at Garbhaig (see below) which cost about £1 million quid to build. So my thought would just be this, next time we have a million quid burning a hole in our pockets, let's put stop-start on the escalators instead of building another power station in the beautiful Scottish highlands.

Photo is from Roddy Smith and geograph. Here's the math if anyone wants to follow it through:

• A typical large underground escalator will have a 7500 W motor.
• There are 422 escalators in London tube stations.
• So to run all the escalators on the tube for 1 hour you need 3165 KWh of energy. 
• 1 KWh of energy creates about 500g of CO2 at average rates for the grid
• That's ~1.5 tonnes for all 422 escalators running for 1 hour
• You could perhaps save 6 hours running time per escalor per day
• That's ~10 tonnes CO2 saved per day or 3650 tonnes per annum
• The average UK house emits about 5 tonnes per annum
• So 6 hours saving per day for 422 escalators = 730 houses

It costs 6p to mow the lawn

This weekend I cut the grass with an electric Flymo.

It took 20 minutes and the flymo has a 1500W engine, so I reckon that I

• used 0.5 KWh of energy
• created 250g of CO2
• spent about 6p.

All in all, a good deal for me. I could have used an old fashioned manual mower and saved 6p, but I thought about it and I didn't want to. So what's my point? Well, I suppose the first is just that consuming energy * is not wrong, in fact it's very helpful. We're lucky that it's so easy to get your hands on some when you need it, even for everyday things. The enemy is waste, not usage, so although we do like the novelty of things like the No Impact Project, we're not really in the same camp.

I suppose the second point is just it should be easier to understand what you use. The math on this really isn't so hard. I'll post the methodology one day soon so everyone can have a go.

* OK physicists, don't all start yelping - I do know that I didn't really consume the energy, I just converted into other things, like noise and heat and grass clippings, which I suppose embody the kinetic energy required to get the blades of grass off the lawn and into the collector. But you can't say that kind of thing on a blog or it slows you down.

A useful thing to do with Carbon

In case anybody missed it, two smart guys from The University of Manchester just got a Nobel Prize for Physics. The prize was for their work on graphene, a material composed of a single layer of carbon atoms in a chicken-wire formation. (Chicken wire - that's a technical term, by the way.)

Graphene is 200 times stronger than steel, if you scaled it up to the thickness of cling film and stretched it over a cup of coffee, it could hold up the weight of a truck bearing down on the point of a pencil.

"Carbon, the basis of all known life on earth, has surprised us once again" said the Royal Academy.

(PS Did you notice that one of the recipients also won The Ig Nobel Prize - for levitating frogs in a magnetic field? I kid you not. The image below is for real, you can download the research paper here.)

100 years to get off the planet

Worth watching this 2 minute video from Stephen Hawking and the Big Think. Hawking says: "If we are the only intelligent beings in the galaxy, we should make sure we survive and continue ... we have made remarkable progress in the last 100 years, but if we want to continue beyond the next 100 years, our future is in space." Wow.



There is more background on the Big Think website, which has been publishing 'one radical new idea' each day this month. You might also want to have a read of Big Idea #16 (Parents Don't Matter), or #1 (Drug our Drinking Water).

Welcome to ... the Altruistic Vigilante

This blog has mostly been about economics, so for a change let's have a crack at some philosophy. Political philosophy, at least.

Norman Lewis has drawn my attention to an FT article about wilful damage. Activists break into an arms factory, smash the place up, but are acquitted in court. The logic is that harm was done, but to prevent further harm, and in the eyes of the law that is acceptable.

So far so good. But what's interesting here is that guilt is established subjectively. The test is not whether your action has actually minimised the damage, but whether you believed that it would. It doesn't matter if you were right, just whether you honestly thought that you were.

Let's drag this back to energy and climate change. What are the implications? Could you break into my house and turn out my lights or smash my tumble dryer? Could you slash the tyres of my car? Or sneak in secretly at night and insulate my loft?

I think we have just invented the Altruistic Vigilante. The floodgates are open. Remember, you read it first here.

Black cabs running on chip fat

So, I don't know enough about biofuels. But I think from what I do know, we'd be better off with Plain Old Electric Vehicles.

Even so I can't help liking Uptown Oil, a company which collects used chip fat from restaurants, cleans it up and sells it back to cabbies for about 10% less than diesel. At least it stops all that bad stuff going down the plughole: apparently we're pouring 400 tonnes of fat down London drains each month, and 500 tonnes at Christmas. So that's the market size right there, if they can collect it.

Somewhat disgustingly, Thames Water have put a video of this on youtube. Follow the link if you want to see what 400 tonnes of Turkey dripping looks like from the inside of a London sewer.

Eeyughk.