Excuse Me While I Get My Gun And March On W12...

Does anyone know whether Ming is in the country at the moment?

I only ask because Newsnight are trying to evaluate the effect of our Olympic performance on the national psyche and they're doing so with the help of everyone's favourite athlete-cum-politician...

Jeffrey Archer

Setting aside the morality of giving media air to a convicted criminal, could they really not have got the politician who actually ran in the Olympics rather than the one whose athletic claim to fame was being hit by a discus while watching a race?

You Can Leave Your Hutton

To judge by the BBC's coverage yesterday, the whole Olympic Games have been tragically overshadowed by a major international incident as the world discovered a nine-year-old girl miming. And they say these London media types have no sense of perspective...

As much as anything else, I'm annoyed by it all largely because I didn't need a admission on Radio Beijing to tell me that she mimed, or that the fireworks thing was CGI-ed; I could see that with my own eyes when I watched the ceremony.

But it's also worth reflecting that it really is only the British who care. To take just the handful of foreign news sites that occurred to me last night, Libération weren't covering it, Al Jazeera weren't covering it and the Drudge Report was highlighting The Telegraph's coverage of it... And yet, there at the same time was Newsnight embarking on a serious discussion of the morality of it all with style rent-a-quote Stephen Bayley.

Now if the Beeb had some evidence that the Chinese authorities were faking athletes performances (something that for a Communist regime, even a cuddly post-Maoist one, isn't, you know, beyond the realms of possibility), that would be serious news worthy of studio guests and a live link-up with Matthew Pinsent in the Olympic Village. What we have instead is the sporting equivalent of someone faking the intro clips for the bands in the Eurovision Song Contest (You mean amusing incidents involving market stalls, BMX riders and jugglers with green, white and red balls aren't a daily occurrence in Belgrade?)

Bill Simmons, one of my favourite sports columnists from America, suggests that all organisations should have a Vice-President of Common Sense. It's a fine idea and we should start with the BBC, particularly in this post-Hutton world. Ultimately, we're clever enough to understand that there is such a thing as the magic of television and that it might be used to make something as utterly inconsequential as an Olympic Opening Ceremony look a bit better; wasting air time pontificating about the morality of it is nothing but pure meeja hor onanism.

Not The Work Of Homer

I seem to have spent an awful lot of time today thinking about this whole question of narratives; the belated spring clean I'm undertaking is probably to blame for this, as are James Graham and Ros Scott. Either way, I doubt you'll be surprised to learn that I haven't found many answers under the piles of paper.

As much as anything this is due to not really knowing what is required. I know that Neil Stockley and the other narrative advocates are right, I do. But agreeing with it gives me absolutely no insight into what it would be. Not that this should surprise me particularly; I am after all a policy wonk of many years standing and that in itself appears to be part of the problem.

Either way, we should resist any effort to use policy to drive any change in the narrative (which, let's face it, is what we're expecting to happen with tuition fees). We undoubtedly need to get better at communicating it, but we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that we do have better policies than the other parties.

There is, however, one thing that does occur to me as a necessary ingredient for the mythic narrative.

Anger.

I may be a policy wonk, but the policies I care about make me angry. Council tax makes me angry. The benefit trap makes me angry. The state of the railways makes me angry. And after eighteen years of Tory neglect and a decade of New Labour bungling, many millions of Britons are angry too.

Not that any of this means that we need Nick Clegg smashing up the Question Time set or taking Scunner Broon outside for a kicking (although I am minded of Leo's line in the West Wing about blowing the Sultan's brains out in Times Square then crossing the street to Nathan's and buying a hot dog...)

What it does mean, however, is being willing to say not merely that we disagree with policy x or policy y, we disagree with what you stand for, in its entirety and to do so with absolute forthrightness. It doesn't even have to be about the words; Ming's conference speech last year could have done it with the right intonation. What's more, anger is a narrative the Conservatives can't steal. David Cameron is not going to summon rage from the depths of Notting Hill, and reaching for it and getting no further than Disgusted Of Tunbridge Wells will just look silly.

Of course I'm almost certainly wrong about all of this. But can we at least agree that we need to sort the narrative out and start doing it?

How Biofuelled Is My Valley?

Speaking of policies that fit our world-view but not necessarily the facts, the dramatic turnaround in the status of biofuel has been a welcome fillip to those of us who care more about pesky little things like facts; we'd expected it to take a lot longer for everyone else to notice. Nevertheless, the real lesson of the whole saga still hasn't quite hit home as it should.

Ultimately, the reason we liked biofuels is the reason we like householder recycling, is the reason we like energy-saving light bulbs. It's all a question of the total sum of individuals making little contributions; biofuels were meant to help in this respect because it's much easier to change from diesel to biofuel than it is to change your car. As Liberal Democrats, we've embraced the idea wholesale and with good reason; for all their talk about neoliberalism, the parishioners of the Church of Environmentalism have failed to notice that this part of their own ideology is the most authentically liberal of the lot.

The key word in that paragraph, however, is car. If changing individual behaviour is your goal, the car is obviously the key target in the transport arena. We've had experiments in other modes, but they've met with a mixture of indifference and antipathy. The biofuel train got the Prime Minister's bum on a seat, but once it reached Llandudno everyone stopped caring. Meanwhile, the biofuel plane was met with positive hostility, but that was more a reflection of a visceral hatred of air travel and Richard Branson than any problem with the energy medium.

Before we write the obituary of biofuels, then, we should at least consider how valid that focus on cars was. Moreover, as much as we need to consider the Kyoto enforcement period (six months down, fifty-four to go), we should also think about the long-term scenario, the eventual low-carbon society we will need to meet the next set of targets and the set after that and the set after that. In the long-term, the criterion to apply is relatively simple. All we are looking for is the technology that delivers, for any particular purpose, the necessary quantity of energy at the right rate for the right period with the lowest emissions.

For the car, you're talking about a technology that can make a one tonne vehicle go from 0-60mph in about ten seconds, maintaining 60mph for about 400 miles with an engine and fuel tank of similar size to those in existing units. For that sort of performance, battery/solar electric systems, fuel cell systems and hydrogen systems are all likely to get there in the next decade or so; on that basis, biofuel is a pretty poor contender.

With the train, the answer is even more obvious because it already exists. Heck, between their massive use of nuclear and the level of electrification of their network, France are already operating an effective model for the sort of zero-carbon system we could introduce in quite short order. Even without a move to nuclear, increased electrification in Britain would mean an effective fuel switch from oil to gas, with at least some reduction in emissions.

(It's worth noting at this point that Labour are perilously close to matching their Conservative predecessors by capping their decline with a disastrous railway-related decision. The crimes of the foot and mouth cull and Iraq and the wastage of the NHS IT programme will be as nothing to the insanity of the current Intercity Express Programme if it does indeed produce a new diesel High Speed Train instead of the wholesale electrification of the remaining inter-city lines we so desperately need.)

And so we come to air travel, where we face a fundamentally different challenge. Jet propulsion absolutely requires a combustible medium, nothing else will do. Moreover, whereas an electric motor for 60mph is a relatively easy proposition, a lightweight pure propeller engine for 60,000lbs of thrust is not. Barring that sort of technological leap, your options are basically hydrogen and biofuel, and even then you have to figure that unless metal hydride storage takes off, hydrogen for air travel pretty much ended with the Hindenburg...

As it turns out, not only are the Envionmentalists wrong that biofuel shouldn't be considered for air travel, but air travel is the only area where pursuing biofuels is essential. I'd be surprised that the truth is the exact opposite of the dogma, but that point has long since passed...

Macrohyperation

So, before I was so rudely interrupted by Tom Brake's legislatory indiscretion, I was writing about some energy news the blogosphere has missed. A more cynical mind would suggest that that omission was a tad convenient...

Microgeneration is one of those policies that ticks all the liberal boxes. The mere idea of millions of individual households all selling electricity they generated themselves undoubtedly generates warm fuzzy feelings in many of our number. It certainly generates warm fuzzy feelings in policy working group members, warranting its own subsection of last year's Zero Carbon Britain policy paper.

You might expect, therefore, the blogosphere to herald the publication of a report commissioned by a consortium including DBERR, various Regional Development Agencies, a couple of NGOs and the odd utility company that, if media reports are to be believed, promises a bright future for the various technologies concerned. Then again, it's entirely possible that the bloggers, unlike the journalists but like the good folks at The Register, actually read the report...

The headline figure is, it is true, quite good; a possible 30 MtCO₂ reduction in emissions by 2030, which would represent a 5% cut on present UK total emissions. From the end of the first paragraph of the headline summary, however, things start to go downhill.

The immediate barrier to adoption of microgeneration is entirely financial. Not only do the existing technologies have significant up-front costs, but consumers continue to attach a higher importance to those up-front costs than to any subsequent long-term savings. In countries where microgeneration has proliferated, it has done so through massive subsidy, both in terms of funding for installation and guaranteed prices for excess generation sold to the market (the “feed-in tariff” of myth and legend...)

Moreover, when we talk about wide scale uptake of microgeneration, we should not con ourselves that we are looking forward to a world of wind turbines on every roof. The reality is that the truly attractive technology is combined heat and power; right now, micro combined heat and power is attractive at a subsidy of 5p/kWh, while micro renewables are only attractive at 40p/kWh.

And as the split there suggests, combined heat and power may well be microgeneration, but it is fossil fuel microgeneration, so the carbon benefits are non-existent. To hit that 30MtCO₂ target, therefore, fuel cell combined heat and power technology is needed. It may well come about, but any assessment of time scales is of necessity an estimate whose optimism must be accounted for.

All in all, the optimistic scenario from paragraph one (and, indeed, from the headlines in The Grauniad and elsewhere) delivers 110 TWh of heat and 30TWh of electricity, of which 16 TWh of heat and 4 TWh of electricity are renewable. The cost?

£21 billion. By 2020. And £5.5 billion per year thereafter.

Of course, the press coverage downplays both the fossil fuelled element and the cost, while making the normal lazy comparison with, in this case, “five nuclear power stations.” Unfortunately, that number is utter bollocks, appearing nowhere in the report. In reality, the zero-carbon element of the microgeneration proposed is worth half a Sizewell B a year (two if you consider total energy and not just electrical). Furthermore, a new Sizewell B costs at most £3 billion, so for the same subsidy needed to give microgeneration a shot you could get twice as much electricity and three times as much zero-carbon energy from new nuclear build.

The numbers go on and on, but I fear there's little point. As I said at the start, we like microgeneration not because it is green, but because it is the opposite of the monolithic, centralised system that nuclear in particular represents. We should remember, however, that our creed is not devolution per se; it is devolution to the lowest level practicable. Microgeneration may entice us, but if it cannot deliver the level of milk and honey we seek, we must discard it.