andygates

Is power-station saboteuring the new black? 

If the government aren't willing or able to cut emissions, people who see sites like Kingsnorth and Drax as great evils will take matters into their own hands.  The protest argument has been won, but the powers that be look to be speaking with forked agenda: plenty of declared commitment but the praxis seems to be lagging dangerously far behind.  Hardly surprising then that the next thing to be done is direct shutdown action.  Prediction: There will be more of this. 

Mostly, though, this sab is a warning shot.  What this says, very clearly, is that any construction of the new coal plant at Kingsnorth will not go unopposed. 

Recorded while preparing for debates: 'Well, the truth is, we can't solve global warming because I f---ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'.

I almost dare to think that he gets it.

I just had to share this link - you know the deal, it's like management bingo, only instead of shouting "Bingo!" when your line manager leverages his synergies in a multidisciplinary customer-facing environment, you get to shout "Bingo!" when some reactionary shill trots out a line about how Michael Crighton predicted an ice age in the 1970s and it's been really cold this week which shows that the hockey stick is broken.

Here's just the sort of home-generation idea that we need: solar roof tiles from SRS Energy.  They are supplied just like ordinary pantiles, and they are installed by roofers, just like ordinary pantiles - not by some expensive tech guy.  Details are a bit thin but they look just awesome to me.

This is the kind of thing which will make the passive home - a building that just consumes energy - an anachronism fairly soon. 

I finally got around to filling up at the local small recycled-restaurant-oil-into-biodiesel place today: www.trybiodiesel.co.uk.  ravenbait, it's in the unit which used to be occupied by the only garage who would look at the ambulance.  Everyone else: it's in a bog-standard rural small-business unit :)

Anyhoo, the stuff costs 96p a litre compared to petrodiesel at 110 a litre, so that's a no-brainer.  And green credentials-wise it's recycled oil, so the issue of provenance of virgin oil (which is what stopped me using virgin oil, at least until that is resolved) is sorted.  The chap can sell as much as he can make: currently he's making 4500 litres (1200 US gal) a week and he's scaling up to 7000 litres (1850 US gal) by the end of the month, with a staff of four including his full-time buyer, who scavenges the area to take away waste oil. 

I mentioned the FuelPod2 to him and it turns out that his kit is basically the FuelPod's big daddy - a GreenFuels monster pipe-spider sucking oil and methanol from pallet-containers and pouring its efforts into tanks.  Lovely job, and he's promised me a factory tour next time I fill up. 

The biodiesel runs nicely, by the way.  Did a lot of driving today.
 

Has anyone got any wisdom to offer with regard to installing a small domestic greywater system?

With the walls off my bathroom, I can see almost all the pipework.  There's plenty of space back there.  I'd quite like to intercept the sink waste and use it for toilet flushing.  The pump and overflows I can probably manage.  How about treatment? 

When Pope Benedict XVI was elected, we all heard the flap about him being in the Hitler Youth as a kid.  No biggie, really - it was mandatory and he wasn't really into it, though executing millions of Jews, gypsies and homosexuals is a tad naughtier than 'youthful indiscretion' normally covers.  Still, it was utter grist for the satirical classes.

It's a week for systems being poked out of whack. 

While deconstructing a piece of shoddy journalism for some local frothy pagans last night, I got to musing on conspiracies and why it is that people are so keen to believe this stuff.  Turns out I'm not the only one: studies, as they say, were done.  People like to assign a big cause to a big event and a little cause to a little event.  This means that 9/11, which scared the hell out of a whole nation and wrecked a skyline, cannot just have been two dozen angry nutters.  Diana's driver can't just have screwed up.  The causes are too small to fit into a satisfying assumption that big begets big and small begets small.

The flipside of this a priori belief is that the little guy cannot affect big things, and of course that's a big problem when trying to persuade people en masse to change their behaviour. 

Bruce Sterling nailed this in Heavy Weather.  People, he reasoned, ain't going to change, and the big systems - governments, economies and the like - have too much inertia to change.  Kyoto's a good example: If you can get a mere framework in place inside fifteen years, you're doing well, never mind implementation.  In Heavy Weather the ecological disaster was undeniable but there was no way to act - people wouldn't change and institutions couldn't - so a conspiracy was created which attempted to halt the destruction by physically destroying the damaging infrastructure. 

I find the irony that the same monkey-headed belief mechanisms that concoct conspiracy theories could be responsible for a situation which requires a genuine global conspiracy to be deeply pleasing in its symmetry.

I also tend to agree with the need for an officially nonexistent transnational series of massive structure hits, but that's just me.  Eschatology and ego mean that I am a big cause, dammit. :)

I have a confession: after I moved into my current flat, I set the wormery up in the yard underneath my big Dexian bench.  And left it there.  And with the bench in the way, I just couldn't be bothered to use the thing or check on the wrigglers.  Every week's to-do list included (along with "fit carpet in van!" and other nonsense) "check on worms!" - the number of exclamation marks and depth of underlining was an indicator of how much guilt I was feeling.  But until the clocks rolled forward, the guilt didn't quite trump the basic slack of being a lazy git. 

At the weekend I moved the wormery to a new location - with staging nearby so it's convenient to use, and no squat rack in the way.  I fully expected to open the thing up and find a soup of dead worm gack.  But no!  Despite almost ten months of pure neglect and no input whatsoever, the little buggers were still in there, still wiggling.  And for the first time ever, the whole thing was lovely compost (apart from a chorizo wrapper, those things get everywhere).

There were fewer worms than there were back at the height of worm glory, in the Golden Age of Worms, true.  The Holy Annelidian Empire has fallen, but the Dark Ages are coming to an end and the Renaissance of the Worms looks to be in full swing, helped along by lots of shredded brown paper, teabags and leek trimmings.  I look forward to seeing the Wriggly Leonardo in there painting masterpieces and constructing machines to turn eggshells into gold, and the Spineless Medicis terrorising the Venice of the Worms - the worm-tea collection level - from just up the coast.

Ten months.  Those buggers are almost unkillable.