Archive for Economics
Great article on the present complete inability of economists and politicians to see what is actually going on:
See full thing at: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=8817&page=1
It is fascinating to watch the behaviour of our political and business leaders as they attempt to cope with the world’s deepening financial crisis. It is becoming clear that they don’t have a clue what is actually going on. Their blindness is explained by confusion about what actually enables economic growth. The shared delusion is that money makes the world go round.
As share and asset values crash we hear talk of deflation. Many nations are trying to counter this by expanding their money supply. However, they seem to have forgotten the most basic fact about money that we are taught in school – that it is a medium of exchange. Money allows agreements on relative “value” (how much of one thing will be exchanged for another) but it has no intrinsic value itself. It is simply a mechanism that allows the distribution of real “stuff”. So if the economy is crashing what is this “stuff” that is disappearing? It can be summed up in one word – energy.
Energy is everything
No living or manufactured thing exists on this planet without energy. It enables flowers and people to grow. We need energy to mine minerals, extract oil or cut wood and then to process these into finished goods. Without energy the goods would not exist so we can think of each product as containing “embodied energy”. So the most fundamental definition of money is that it is a mechanism to allow the exchange and allocation of different forms of energy. The economy is energy
The most important source of energy in the world economy is hydrocarbons – molecules made up of hydrogen and carbon atoms. Small hydrocarbon molecules form gases such as natural gas. Larger molecules form the liquid we know as crude oil. Hydrocarbons can be burned to provide heat energy to power generators and motors. Almost all transport relies on liquid hydrocarbon energy. Hydrocarbons are also incredibly useful for making plastics. It is difficult to find any manufactured thing that does not now include plastic. Oil and natural gas provide almost 2/3rds of the energy used in the world economy. A simpler way to say this is that hydrocarbons are 2/3rds of the world economy.
Until recently (about 2005) the world economy was growing. The number of people has been increasing which requires increased production of food, clothing and shelter – the basics. On top of this, many of us have been using more energy than previously – to travel farther, eat more food, buy additional clothes and enhance our shelters. Until 2005 we could expand our energy use to meet this demand. This is something we were able to do – with occasional interruptions – for the past 150 years. However, after 2005 we could not expand our energy supply. In other words we could not expand the world economy.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Day One -20th May – of the forthcoming All Energy conference in Aberdeen
Posted by: | Commentsre the Grid, the second one being the one I’ve put together re the Legal and Financial Infrastructure.
I have Aily Armour-Biggs (a Clavertonite) chairing it, plus a Scottish Government speaker, Mike McElhinney, and a lawyer from Talisman Energy, Jacquelynn Craw, who is very familiar with the North Sea MasterDeed legal infrastructure Read More→
Popularity: 6% [?]
HOUSE OF COMMONS SEMINAR ON LAND VALUE TAXATION
Posted by: | Comments
Organised by The Coalition for Economic Justice Hosted by Vince Cable MP
Panel of Speakers:
Sir Sam Brittan, Financial Times
Fred Harrison*, Land Research Trust
Prof Iain McLean, Professor of Politics– Oxford University Ashley Seager, The Guardian Molly Scott Cato, Green Party Economics speaker David Triggs, Henry George Foundation
* Author of Boom Bust: House Prices, Banking and the Depression of 2010.
There was standing room only in Committee Room 5 at the House of Commons on Tuesday evening for a lively and stimulating seminar hosted by Vince Cable. The Coalition for Economic Justice – a recently formed grouping of concerned organisations across and beyond the political spectrum– believes that the private appropriation of community-created site values is lethal in its effect on our economic arrangements, dooming every economic upswing to an ultimate collapse. To end this cycle of boom and bust it is vital that the Government has some control over the level of property prices. Land value taxation would give it that control.
The House of Commons seminar held last Tuesday was aimed at parliamentarians and policymakers. It examined the advantages of land value taxation, how it might be introduced and how transitional problems could be dealt with.
As Sir Sam Brittan saw it, the case for LVT was clear and simple. But perversely, people find this difficult to grasp; they expect complexity in taxes. Being a tax on unearned value increment, LVT was no disincentive to Labour or Capital. As a temporary expedient, pending the full introduction of LVT, he advocated the auctioning of planning permissions.
Ashley Seager of The Guardian cited instances where public expenditure had led to massive increases in property (i.e., land) prices. In one case, the building of a school had led to such a big increase in local property prices that teachers in the school could not afford to live in the area. As the land of this country is provided free of charge by nature, “rising property prices do not raise national wealth one single penny”. They serve no useful economic purpose and are an obvious target for taxation.
Professor Iain McLean explained how, as a member of the independent expert group set up by the Calman Commission, he was looking at LVT as a way of financing public services in Scotland and Wales. LVT would replace council tax, business rates and stamp duty.
>From a Green perspective (Molly Scott Cato), land is a trust for the
people, its life-giving properties to be preserved from one generation to the next. LVT, which aims to curb private profiteering from the nation’s patrimony, was seen as a valuable tool in this connection.
The groundwork for the panel discussions was set out by David Triggs in his opening address. “The challenge that confronts those interested in establishing a just and equitable division of the fruits of production lies essentially in recognising that land values impound that part of the value created which is attributable to factors external to the individual, e.g., the country’s infrastructure, the system of governance, law and order and the density of population. It is manifestly unfair to tax the individual on what he produces while those community-created values are provided tax-free to the benefit of the landowner. These land values, arising essentially from location, should be the primary source of taxation.”
Fred Harrison reinforced this message. He showed how failure to collect location value led to diminished opportunity and life expectancy at the marginal location.
James Black (a sixth-former) said LVT made common sense to the young and the opportunity should not be missed.
This seminar is the first step in a campaign to interest parliamentarians in the formation of an all party parliamentary group on Land Value Taxation.
END
For further information contact
John Lipetz, 020 7794 5343, johnlipetz@hotmail.com Robin Smith, 07786 078836, robinsmith3@gmail.com Dave Wetzel, 07715322926, davewetzel42@googlemail.com Tony Vickers, 07950202640, tonyvickers@phonecoop.coop
www.c4ej.comCEJ Member Organisations:
Labour Land Campaign (LLC)
Liberal Democrat Action for Land Taxation and Economic Reform (ALTER) Social Liberalist Party (SLP) Systemic Fiscal Reform Group (SFRG) School of Economic Science (SES) Land is Free (LF) Henry George Foundation (HGF) Land Value Taxation Campaign (LVTC) Professional Land Reform Group (PLRG) Christian Council for Monetary Justice (CCMJ) Global Justice Movement (GJM) The 1909 Group
Popularity: 5% [?]
ZERO EMISSION HYBRID RAILCAR
Posted by: | CommentsUltra Light Rail – the Fast Track to Fuel Cells
Introducing Fuel Cells to the Commercial Public Transport Market
Fuel cells are now recognised as a key technology in the process of weaning the modern world from its dependence on fossil fuels and leading it into a new age of alternative energy. The principal obstacle still to be overcome is the high cost of fuel cells. In transport, for example, one kilowatt from a fuel cell costs around $3,000, compared with $30 per kilowatt for an internal combustion engine. Somehow a reduction of two orders of magnitude has to be achieved if fuel cells are to compete with alternatives in the commercial market for transport.
There are two complementary approaches to achieving this reduction. The first and most obvious is to increase the efficiency of the fuel cell in producing electricity from hydrogen. But producing electricity is not an end in itself. It is rather a means to enable us to achieve the end objective, which is to provide people with useful services such as heat, light and mobility. The cost of mobility can therefore be reduced just as much by increasing the energy efficiency of the system in which the fuel cell is used, as by increasing the efficiency of the fuel cell itself.
Ultra Light Rail is a transport system designed to eliminate the two orders of magnitude gap between the fuel cell and the internal combustion engine. The first step is to increase the efficiency of the vehicle system in which the fuel cell is used. This can be done in a number of ways but the most dramatic “step change” in energy efficiency can be achieved by using a vehicle running with steel wheels on steel rails. This immediately reduces the energy requirement by a factor of three, since the lower rolling resistance allows a tram to use only one third of the energy required by a similar sized bus.
Further cost reductions in the vehicle system can be achieved by introducing an on-board energy storage system in a hybrid electric drive train, similar, in principle, to that used in the Toyota Prius and other cars and even in some buses. This makes possible a lower rating for the prime on-board power source which is required only to run at its optimum level, in order to keep the energy storage system topped up. It also allows for the energy from braking to be recaptured and used, rather than dissipated in heat vented to the atmosphere. Still more efficiency can be introduced by integrating the electric motors into the wheels. The overall weight of the vehicle can be reduced by each of these innovations whilst the body itself can be manufactured from carbon fibre composite materials in a monocoque form. The whole process, using standard proven technology, creates a spiralling cost reduction, resulting from each innovative feature.
Using only some of these features, practical test work carried out by Sustraco Ltd, with support from a Carbon Trust grant, has shown that a 25 kilowatt fuel cell would be sufficient to power a light tram with similar capacity to the fuel cell buses tested in London under the EU’s CUTE programme. These buses have done an invaluable job in demonstrating to the public that fuel cells are no different to internal combustion engines in performance and safety. However the buses themselves are grossly inefficient in commercial terms, costing, as they do, some five times as much as a similar diesel bus and requiring 250 kilowatts fuel cell to operate them. The next logical step in commercialising the operation of fuel cell powered public transport vehicles must therefore be to integrate the fuel cell into an energy efficient tram.
The full report can be found by following this Link.
Popularity: 15% [?]
Labour’s preference for market principles and big companies betrays its low-carbon rhetoric
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- The Guardian, Friday 27 February 2009
- Article history
The UK’s energy policy has to focus on lowering carbon emissions by a combination of renewable energy and reducing demand. This requires a system almost entirely different from that we have in place today: one that is conducive to innovation and change; and one that is flexible and resilient to all sorts of technological futures.
The current coal policy illuminates just how static and rigid – the opposite of innovative – Britain’s energy policy is. This lack of innovation has been fought for, and won, by the large companies and lobbies, so they can carry on doing as they wish – despite the urgency of climate change. The government has been complicit in this, and it is the people of Britain, and their children, who will have to pay for the consequences.
- Catherine Mitchell is professor of energy policy at the University of Exeter catherine.mitchell@exeter.ac.uk
Popularity: 8% [?]
