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Medium Green (Geophysics)
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Mick Harper
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An ongoing scandal that suffers more than ordinarily from careful ignoral.
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Trawling for Treasure July 28, 2024

Life in the sea relies quite a lot on the sea bed so how do you feel about these latest proposals from a consortium of Australian mining companies? Should they really be given carte blanche to ‘hoover up’ nickel and cadmium nodules on the sea floor anywhere they want within two hundred miles of the British coastline?

I should warn you it is not disputed the methods they intend using will destroy the sea floor’s productive capacity for approximately fifty years. No other methods are even on the table despite there being less destructive, albeit more expensive, ways of doing it.

You’re fine about it, are you? You buy the argument the world is so desperately short of nickel and cadmium, outside China, it’s a reasonable trade-off, do you? Hell, there’s plenty of British territorial sea bed to go round, right? There’ll always be loads unaffected yet or coming back to life after fifty years. Plus, you’ll be relieved to hear, the British government has designated certain small inshore areas as being ‘off limits’ and no doubt the companies will respect this.

I’ll put your views on file in case such a proposal is ever made. There are no such proposals, I made them up. But for a good reason.

Some things get our dander up, some don’t. Try this one for size:

Trawlers, dredgers and scallop boats smash the sea bed to bits every time they run their gear over it to dislodge plaice, turbot, scallops etc. It takes about fifty years before everything gets fully back to the status quo ante. This affects all fish, not just bottom-dwellers, because fry need the haven of a fully-functioning sea bed.

There are other ways to catch fish but they are more expensive than the the ‘sea-floor bashing’ method so if only Britain takes action it will likely mean the end of the British fishing fleet.
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Mick Harper
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Oh no, he's not back on water companies, is he?
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It’s not water under this bridge July 31, 2024
Do you want to drink from the free enterprise tap?

I got into a mild argy-bargy with a fellow Medium contributor over our joint water-supplier, Thames Water. They’re on the verge of going bankrupt and we’ll have to drink Evian.

All the other water companies are hanging on but only by dumping more and more sewage into our rivers rather than building more and more treatment plants. My Medium man (and everyone else) seems to think the water companies are the villains.

They are, but only kinda.

In the old days we got our water from our local publicly-owned utility, ‘the water board’. It provided us with cheap if not very tasty water, it took away our bodily effluxions without fuss, and we didn’t even have to pay for it. Well, we did but only as an unnoticed line on our general rates bill for dustbinmen, librarians et al. Everything was sweetness and light except oftentimes

our rivers were middlingly polluted.

None of the water boards had enough money to do anything much about it and the government only stepped in if things got so bad it caused a stink. Especially if it was the Thames where the politicians are only yards away and have very long noses.

We denizens of the Thames Valley didn’t have to pay a sou for the clean-up.

We now motor on to the 1980’s and Britain is in the throes of Thatcherite privatisation mania. Whither water? It’s a natural monopoly, everyone has to have it, it’s an old technology, it can only be monetised with great difficulty and there’s a limited upside for opportunity profit.

Not what anyone would call promising territory for free market principles.

But, even so, there is no reason not to put the water industry in private hands. Leftists are completely daft when it comes to who is better suited to providing a service to customers in exchange for money. Is it civil servants or is it hard-nosed capitalists? I’ll give them a clue, it isn’t civil servants.

So what went wrong?

* Increased demand meant water ceased to be a matter of distribution but a question of conservation
* Global warming and new weather patterns meant too much water and/or too little water any time of the year but most years
* The amenity industry took off — rivers were being used by everyone from kingfisher fanciers to rough swimmers so they had to be clean
* Agriculture was increasing the use of fertilisers which inevitably reached the rivers in greater quantities
* Intensive animal rearing was dumping swill in the rivers (especially organic and free range animals who couldn’t be kept in proper purpose-built factory units)

None of these were problems any PLC could not handle in its sleep.

You just increase the price of your product and do the needful. Except for one thing: the customers were no longer paying for water in their sleep. They weren’t facing increased rates and having hard words with the local council, now it was having to pay a relatively whopping bill from Thames Water or United Utilities or whoever.

And it wasn’t clear who you swore at.

The water companies for being grasping capitalists?
The regulator, Ofwat, for allowing them to be grasping capitalists?
The government for allowing the regulator to allow it?
Ourselves for being bellyaching cheapskates?

The one thing the Great British Public is known for is its sense of fair play.

There was no question, it was the water companies. They weren’t even British for goodness sakes. They were pension funds in Ontario, Dubai and China who had bought into the industry on the basis that providing water and taking away sewage were nice, dependable little earners that could be left in the hands of professional managers, who had been running it in their sleep since the nineteenth century.

Except now they couldn’t, it had all become political.

If no-one was prepared to pay the bucks to bring the water industry kicking and screaming into the 21st century, who was going to?

* the public kicked and screamed at the government
* the government had a quiet word with the regulator
* the regulator leant quietly on the managers of the water companies
* the managers quietly dumped more and more sewage into the rivers
* the owners quietly started dumping their investment.

But naturally they extracted as much money as they could

while they still could, by way of bonuses and dividends. Rather than build all the new infrastructure which wasn’t going to benefit them any, they would be long gone. The regulator and the politicians were completely out of their depths and let it happen. (He was from the atomic energy industry, they were from central miscasting.)

However, no great harm will be done

because, when it is time to take the water companies ‘back into public ownership’, they won’t be worth what the pension funds paid (but they will still be showing a profit of sorts). Then it will be the job of the British government to spend billions and billions renewing the leaking pipes, upgrading the sewage works and what have you.

I don’t know whether they will.

I don’t even know whether they should, I’m a big fan of less than pristine rivers, hosepipe bans and low water charges. But we’ll muddle along somehow.
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Mick Harper
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A bit heartfelt for me. I drop my pose from time to time.
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Things can only get better August 3, 2024
If only they weren’t getting worse

You have probably noticed — everyone has — that the world is headed for a pretty grim future, climate-wise. Hell, according to the news every day, it’s already arrived.

You have probably noticed — everyone has — that far from getting better, every metric appears to indicate that things are getting worse. The only argument is over how fast.

You have probably noticed — everyone has — that the world keeps holding climate change conferences at which everybody agrees to do stuff and either they don’t or it makes no difference if they do. Or it turns out to have made things worse.

You are probably calling for another conference — everyone is — because things can’t go on like this. The only argument is over where to hold it.

You probably won’t listen to me — nobody ever does — when I say it is essential to stop holding climate change conferences. Right now. Before it is too late.

There is a lot we don’t know about climate change but one thing we have discovered, by statistical iteration over many years, is that holding conferences about climate change not only does not address the problems of climate change but they give the illusion that the problems of climate change are being addressed. This is the worst of all outcomes.

I will turn my mind to what we do instead as soon as the essential pre-condition — no more climate change conferences — is achieved. Hell, I’ll do better than that, I will do so when I observe the first tiny step towards achieving this interim goal. I therefore call on the British government to announce they will not be attending the next one.

So you can see that ain’t never going to happen.
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