BAN BULBS & CARMAKER BADDIES SAY BEEB & BEBER

The BBC recently ran an article calling for the incandescent bulb to be outlawed in favour of the compact fluorescent. Good idea, but the ideal is to go well beyond that and outlaw everything except LEDs, which use far less power even than fluorescents. A stroke of the statutary pen is far, far cheaper than building a clutch of new power-stations. But that would mean politicians would have to become wise, and sensible, and caring, and think... :-((

Under the headline 'Big business and greenhouse: a declaration of surrender', Professor Sharon Beder neatly exposes the Big Iron carmakers for what they are. Well done!

PRESIDENT BUSH: STATE OF THE NATION--O DEAR!

In President Bush's State of the Nation address he said, 'Keeping America competitive requires affordable energy. Here we have a serious problem: America is addicted to oil, which is often imported from unstable parts of the world. The best way to break this addiction is through technology.

'Since 2001, we have spent nearly $10bn to develop cleaner, cheaper, more reliable alternative energy sources--and we are on the threshold of incredible advances. So tonight, I announce the Advanced Energy Initiative--a 22% increase in clean-energy research at the Department of Energy, to push for breakthroughs in two vital areas.

'This country can move beyond a petroleum-based economy and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past

'To change how we power our homes and offices, we will invest more in zero-emission coal-fired plants; revolutionary solar and wind technologies; and clean, safe nuclear energy. We must also change how we power our automobiles. We will increase our research in better batteries for hybrid and electric cars, and in pollution-free cars that run on hydrogen.

'We will also fund additional research in cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol, not just from corn but from wood chips, stalks, or switch grass. Our goal is to make this new kind of ethanol practical and competitive within six years. Breakthroughs on this and other new technologies will help us reach another great goal: to replace more than 75% of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025.

'By applying the talent and technology of America, this country can dramatically improve our environment--move beyond a petroleum-based economy--and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past.'

Paragraph one, so far so good. Paragraph two throws more money at the problem, as if not enough were the cause of the US addiction to oil and more money will fix it. Paragraph three, echoed in the last paragraph, is also fine as far as it goes, but it is in the how that the thing comes unglued. There is no such thing as a 'zero-emission coal-fired plant.' Never in the history of the universe has it been possible to oxidise carbon without getting an oxide of carbon, and the notion that you stuf it all down a hole in the ground and make everything OK is baloney. The earth is not geologically stable, and the carbon-dioxide has no half-life: it stays just as damaging for ever. So it is a disaster waiting down there. But even if it were safe, there is no way that we can stuff all our industrial carbon-dioxide down holes in the ground, even if we could capture it all. And stuffing carbon-dioxide down there means stuffing two atoms of oxygen down there for every atom of carbon, which should worry oxygen-breathing creatures, because it would slowly reduce the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere... Doh!

'Clean, safe nuclear energy', says President Bush. There's a double-whammy oxymoron. Since when were aeons of radioactivity safe? Or clean? Perhaps he means that the radiation kills bugs. Would he want a 'clean, safe' nuclear power-station next to his Texas ranch?

Solar- and wind-technologies are available now: there is no need to wait for some American 'revolutionary' version. Just start using them.

Ditto the better batteries and the hydrogen fuel-cells. They are there now, and the best ones are not American. All they have to do is start using the things. If they wanted to they could change over their whole country in a decade at very most.

Then the bio-fuel thing gets a plug. But burning stuff is burning stuff, no matter what you are burning. We have to stop burning stuff, no matter whether it died yesterday or hundreds of millions of years ago. The idea that it is OK if you keep growing more stuff to burn, and growing it uses the smoke from the previous lot is flawed logic. There is a gap between the burning and the re-growing, and energy has to be used in turning it into fuel, which means it is not, as is claimed, carbon-neutral. It is carbon-negative. Less so than other carbon, but still negative.

And what is the stated goal of spending all that money? 'To replace more than 75% of our oil from the Middle East by 2025.' 2025! They are aiming, they say, to take twenty years to cut a big chunk of their oil-consumption from the Middle East. So they are not going all out to stop using the black stuff. Dumb. Very, very dumb. In twenty years' time the amount of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere will be at least 40-50ppm higher than the 380ppm we have now, and the scientific consensus reached in London over a year ago was there is 'no safe increase.' America has to learn to read.

President Bushsays America is going to lead the world. Obviously to an even worse global climate than we have now. O goody! If that is leadership, America, keep it. Only fools would follow.

Therefore the energy chunk of President Bush's speech is just another iteration of the same, tired old American pretence and self-deception, the notion that billions and many years have to be spent before the necessary technological solutions will be there (and the billions have to be American, of course). They ignore the fact that the technology is there now. All that is needed is the will to change to it. Use the billions to subsidise a programme of hugely accelerated production of solar-cells and fuel-cells. Stop thinking that America has all the answers. It certainly doesn't have the best fuel-cells. Solar-cells, yes (Sunpower Corporation's). So put them together. Right now. And let the Middle East oil stay in the ground; stop pumping it into the sky.

But the very next day after his speech, what had seemed to be just another hot-air iteration was revealed to be even worse. Mercury News reported: 'One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.

'What the President meant, they said in a conference call with reporters, was that alternative fuels could displace an amount of oil imports equivalent to most of what America is expected to import from the Middle East in 2025.

'But America still would import oil from the Middle East, because that's where the greatest oil supplies are.'

'Bush vowed to fund research into better batteries for hybrid vehicles and more production of the alternative fuel ethanol, setting a lofty goal of replacing "more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East by 2025."

'He pledged to "move beyond a petroleum-based economy and make our dependence on Middle Eastern oil a thing of the past."

'Not exactly, though, it turns out.

'"This was purely an example," Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said.

'He said the broad goal was to displace foreign oil imports, from anywhere, with domestic alternatives. He acknowledged that oil is a freely traded commodity bought and sold globally by private firms. Consequently, it would be very difficult to reduce imports from any single region, especially the most oil-rich region on Earth.

'Asked why the President used the words "the Middle East" when he didn't really mean them, one administration official said Bush wanted to dramatise the issue in a way that "every American sitting out there listening to the speech understands." The official spoke only on condition of anonymity because he feared that his remarks might get him in trouble.'

American business as usual. Dollars first. The planet and human life second.

HOW NOT TO MAKE JOE'S OF OURSELVES

In 1946, Will F. Jenkins, a fifty-year-old American science-fiction writer, sat down to write a short story under his nom de plume Murray Leinster.
1946 was also the year in which ENIAC, the first large-scale digital computer was completed in the United States, and just three years after the world's first electronic computer--Colossus--had sprung into life in wartime Britain (although it was to stay a secret for thirty years). ENIAC was 100 feet long, 10 feet high, weighed 30 tons, contained more than 18,000 vacuum tubes and 70,000 transistors, and drew over 100,000 watts of electricity. It needed a cooling system so big that it could have serviced a twenty-storey building.
Very impressive physical statistics, but by today's standards the machine that had them was not very powerful, even though it could do in two hours what would have taken 100 engineers a year. It was thought pretty marvellous at the time, but what computers would become half a century later was still far beyond the imaginative horizon. Even when IBM began looking at computers a few years later it thought the total world market for them would never be more than twelve machines.
Big Blue should have read Leinster's story. He foresaw exactly what was coming, not that you would think so from the unassuming, slightly odd, title: A Logic Named Joe.
That story has since become one of the most famous in science-fiction, because it talks about a society in which every home and office has what we now call a PC. But the machines he described were far more advanced than today's PCs; they were what might be called the hypermedia machines that we have only fairly recently begun talking about.
Way back then the term PC, had not been invented, and even 'computer' had not penetrated the general consciousness, so Leinster called his machines 'logics', hence the title.
His story would have been remarkable even if he had still been alive to write it in 1986 (he died in 1975), but to have written it in 1946 is an astonishing, and unique, feat of prescience.
He not only predicted the hypermedia home/office computer. He also predicted the microprocessor--the 'chip'--although its invention was over twenty years in the future. Again, because the terms integrated circuit, microprocessor and chip had not been invented in 1946, he had to invent his own term--'Carson Circuits.' He could not possibly have known of course that it would be a chap called Poor, not Carson, who would be the first to design a computer on a chip, but getting nine out of ten when no one else even knows there is a test is not bad.
Leinster's story also predicted memory cards, but they had not been invented so he called them data-plates. He predicted a global network of publicly accessible databases, but they had not been invented so he called them tanks. And he predicted that videophones would be integrated into PCs, but they had not been invented so he called them vision-phones.
Nearly fifty years later we have only got as far as creating chips, and, recently, memory sticks have begun to be widely used, but we still have not come anywhere near universality in computers, let alone hypermedia machines, or even multimedia ones.
But Leinster's astonishing story is much more than a dazzling array of technological predictions. It also carries a warning.
It is told from the point of view of an unnamed maintenance man who works for the Logics Company. He discovers one day that some undetectable, accidental hiccup in the production line has created a machine--which he later dubs Joe--that has a mind of its own.
When he had, unknowingly, installed it late one Saturday in August in 'the home of Mr Thaddeus Korlanovitch at 119 East Seventh Street, second floor front', he had left, as usual, thinking that 'everything was serene.'
But the Korlanovitch family went out on Sunday and the kids left Joe turned on. 'He' must have been a bit 'bored' because he went looking in the 'tank' network for something to do.
Joe, as the maintenance man tells us, was not being vicious, just logical, just using his abilities. He discovered things. He made connections. Using logic. He discovered that there are things humans want to know, but don't. So he made an addition to the services offered by the global network of logics and tanks--one that, logically, got past the 'censor circuits.'
'If you want to know something and don't know how to do it--ask your logic!' suddenly flashed up on every screen on the planet.
'!', indeed.
People assumed that it was all official. They asked questions. They got answers. Perfectly logical answers.
Like the man who wanted to know how to murder his wife and get away with it, the one who wanted to know how to prevent his spouse finding out that he had been drinking, the one who wanted to make a perpetual-motion machine, the one who wanted to make flawless counterfeit money, and the bank manager who wanted to know how to rob his bank undetected.
Logics, backed by Joe, gave people whatever information they asked for. They held nothing back. They did not even stint, for example, when unsavoury and unsocial types asked them how they could acquire supplies of high-explosives.
You get the picture. The results were rapidly becoming catastrophic. And would have got a lot worse if an incandescent blonde femme fatale who had known the maintenance man long before he became a happily married pillar of the logic world had not asked her logic how she could get in touch with 'Ducky' again.
The newly enhanced system took a little while to work out how to do that, but the result was that a maintenance man's life was suddenly invaded by incandescent chaos and threatened with meltdown of the fatale kind.
He, though, had no wish to become husband number five of this blonde weapon of male-destruction, and even less to suffer the fate of the one who had shuffled off his mortal coil very precipately after she had added a modicum of lead to his system at lethal velocity.
Fortunately the maintenance man had the presence of mind to ask the network if a logic could be modified 'to co-operate in long-term planning that human brains are too limited in scope to do?'
Being logical it said yes, and told him how.
And when he asked if one had ever been produced with that modification, it told him, yes, just one, and where it had been installed. He promptly raced over the Korlanovitch flat, pulled Joe out and replaced him with a normal model. The new Joe-based tell-me-anything service immediately vanished from every logic screen.
Whew! Civilisation had been saved. And it was only Monday.
But the maintenance man succumbed to temptation. He didn't smash Joe to smithereens. After all, he reasoned, he might come in handy--for personaluse only, of course, and tamed a bit. So he put him down in his basement.
Back in the real world of 2006, we have not yet reached far past the starting point of Leinster's story. We have not yet produced the unit technology, although we are close; we have not saturated the globe with networks and databases, although we have made a solid start; we have not yet come anywhere near the numbers needed to achieve 'logics' for everyone, although computer factories are churning out their precursors like so many grains of sand, and we recently chalked up the billionth person on the Internet, the crude forerunner of the network Leinster predicted.
But there are rich and powerful companies beavering night and day to lead us to the threshold of his world, a world in which 'logics are civilisation,' as that maintenance man tells us. A world in which, 'If we shut off logics we go back to a kind of civilisation we have forgotten how to run!'
But before we get to that threshold--long before--we must ensure that 'Joe' shall never exist, because in a world full of such overly smart machines--or even just where we have easy access to unlimited information--Pope's famous dictum would be turned on its head and our social fabric rent asunder:

It is not, 'A little learning is a dangerous thing,
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.'

But, 'O'ermuch wrong learning is most dangerous of all,
Choose well what you know or the world will fall.'

In A Logic Named Joe the rending asunder almost happens by accident. We must prevent it from happening by design.

[If you want to read the original story, it can be found in the anthology Machines that Think, edited by Isaac Asimov, Patricia S. Warrick, & Martin H. Greenberg and published under Penguin's Allen Lane imprint.]

ASTEROIDS, ALIENS, NAZIS & OTHER ENEMIES OF THE HUMAN RACE

If a giant asteroid was heading for the earth we would spare no expense, no amount of international co-operation and effort, no technology to destroy it.

If aliens were real, and were about to invade or were threatening to, we would spare not expense, no amount of international co-operation and effort, no technology to defeat and destroy them.

When the Nazis--who were very real--tried to take over the world, we spared no expense, no amount of international co-operation and effort, no technology to defeat and destroy them.

But we allow the equally real, modern-day enemies of the human race to flourish--the Boys from the Black Stuff (i.e., the coal and oil barons) and the Big Iron carmakers. We do more. We encourage them, we applaud them, we join them, we help them as they go about their business making the products that are wrecking the only planet we can live on in the entire universe. We even measure the success of our economies by how well they do it. We allow them to destroy us. We call it progress.

EXOPLANETARY LOONIES

O goody! The 'exoplanet' hunters tell us they have spotted a 'cousin' to the earth. Hmmmm. 5.5 times the size of the earth, which means you would weigh 5.5 times as much if it's about the same density. It is also -223 degrees Celsius, a tad chilly for getting up early in the mornings. And it is about 235 million miles away from its star, which is only a reddish one, so the light would not be too bright. And it is about 25,000 light-years from here.

So to get to this hellish 'cousin' you would have to travel at the speed of light for 25,000 years, if that were possible--i.e, about 560 million years at the speed of our rockets. And the same back if you found it was not like the Bahamas, or that squadrons of something frigid and slimy objected to your company, or that you had forgotten your lunch or that you hadn't locked the front door before you left.

Even a phone call home would take 25,000 years to make a connection, then you would have to wait 50,000 years between saying something and hearing the response. That would make even a short conversation ten sentences each go on for a million years. If you got a wrong number it would take you 50,000 years to find out, then another 25,000 to re-connect. If your batteries lasted that long. Even nuclear power would be iffy. Those sorts of numbers are way outside the half life of fissile atoms. Maybe you could use a bicycle generator...

Those exoplanet guys are semi-morononic profligate loonies. They are wasting buckets of money in the name of some tooth-fairy, substitute religion and calling it science. Meanwhile, back here on the only planet that we can live on in the entire universe that we know of and can reach--which makes it the only one, period--it would take just $US500,000 and less than two years to produce a planet-friendly car that would save us from the worst consequences of our fossil-burning addiction and madness.

WE ARE THE MOUSE IN THE JAR WITH THE CANDLE

If you take a large bell-jar, put a lighted candle and a mouse in, then put the cork on, after a while the mouse will keel over and die, because the burning candle will have consumed so much oxygen that the mouse will be asphyxiated.

Burning oil and coal does the same to the earth, but it takes longer because the earth is a big jar and there are plants making oxygen. But, slowly, slowly, slowly, as we keep burning the Black Stuff and bumping off plants we are reducing the percentage of oxygen in the air. So far, the coal boys assure us, we have reduced it only .03%. But the more carbon-dioxide there is the less oxygen there is, and the level of carbon-dioxide is rising at an accelerating rate, so the level of oxygen is decreasing likewise.

When do we start worrying? The section on this page headed 'Physiology of Asphyxiation' shows that degrees of asphyxia start surprisingly early. Even at 20% of oxygen by volume you get 'dimunition of physical and intellectual performance.'

The US safety body, OSHA, can shut down a public building if the level of oxygen in it drops only 1%. And OSHA rules say that miners and other people who work underground or in confined spaces must wear safety gas-alarms that will sound off for evacuation at 'the hazard level of 19.5% oxygen.' At sustained levels of 16.5% (about the concentration in the air you breathe out), we can die from asphyxiation.

This page gives all the OSHA regulations, and includes this paragraph: 'Oxygen deprivation is one form of asphyxiation. While it is desirable to maintain the atmospheric oxygen level at 21% by volume, the body can tolerate deviation from this ideal. When the oxygen level falls to 17%, the first sign of hypoxia is a deterioration to night vision which is not noticeable until a normal oxygen concentration is restored. Physiologic effects are increased breathing volume and accelerated heartbeat. Between 14-16% physiologic effects are increased breathing volume, accelerated heartbeat, very poor muscular coordination, rapid fatigue, and intermittent respiration. Between 6-10% the effects are nausea, vomiting, inability to perform, and unconsciousness. Less than 6%, spasmatic breathing, convulsive movements, and death in minutes.'

It is therefore not a good idea take much oxygen out of the atmosphere. Below 20% none of us can function at our best, at 19/5% the hazard starts in earnest, and every 1% drop below that is a really bad idea. The risk is increased if the displacing gas is carbon-dioxide, because increased carbon-dioxide levels in the body compound the effect of reduced oxygen by messing up our respiratory reflex, which is controlled by the level of carbon-dioxide.

If we were to burn all the 1980 billion tonnes of coal known to exist in the world, we would remove about 3% of the oxygen. Then there is the oil on top of that...

The earth is a big jar, but we need to snuff that candle.

VIVE LE ROI! HAGUE THE LOT OF THEM!

The true ROI is not a dollar dividend [ROI means return on investment, which also means king in French, so it makes a nice pun because the ROI rules the heads of business greedies]. No, the true return is the planetary one--and there always is one, either positive or negative. Even if you never made a cent, if you benefitted the planet you got the best dividend there is, particularly in these abnormal days when the future of civilisation is being trashed.

The worst international crimes are not committed by war-criminals, they are committed by those who made the dollar ROI king--what you might call the peace-criminals: those who in times of peace act in such ways that vast numbers of people will die or will have their lives made nasty, brutish and short.

So forget the Hitlers, the Stalins, the Pol Pots, the Mao Tse Tungs. And forget the fraudsters at Enron, Worldcom, Parmalat, etc. They are the small fry. Arrest the biggies, go after the real criminals, the peace-criminals, the garbage responsible for trashing the only planet we can live on in the entire universe, who will therefore cause the deaths of billions. Arrest the oil and coal barons, the Big Iron carmakers, the executives of the fossil-fuelled power-stations. Take them to the Hague, try them for crimes against humanity, lock them up for ever. Regrettably, it is no longer considered PC to hang people for crimes against humanity.

CARBON-DIOXIDE LEVELS SOARING & WHEN THE LIGHTS GO OUT

An article in the Independent gives advance notice of the increase in atmospheric carbon-dioxide for 2005, and shows that for the first ten months alone it rose 2.2 parts per million, which means the rise for the whole year will be about 2.6ppm. That is a staggering 173% leap from the average of 1.5ppm per year where it has been for the last fifty years--and that was an annual increase that should never have been, and never would have if we had not developed our insane addiction to the Black Stuff. That steady rise of 1.5ppm per annum was bad enough, because it took us from the 280ppm that was safe for human life to the very unsafe 380ppm, but then three or four years ago it suddenly went to 2ppm, and now we have this even bigger jump.

So it now looks certain that the predicted accelerated-feedback has begun, in which the overheating earth starts adding ever more carbon-dioxide to the vast amount that we are pumping into the sky, because bacteria in the soil become more active, the permafrost thaws faster and faster, the oceans reach the limit of what they can absorb and start emitting what they have absorbed (warm water can hold less gas than cold), etc., etc.

So now we are really for it. It is not just the frogs that will be croaking all over the planet. Billions of humans will be wiped out of history too.

It is enough to make one weep, or rage, or both.

Meantime the murderous liars, the arrant knaves, the blind blockheads and the greedy sub-human rogues in governments, boardrooms and CEO suites all over the planet are carrying on as if nothing has changed, as if the normality of the past 10,000 years is still here. But they have destroyed it by their sins of comission and omission.

If you click on the link to the Independent, look also at the links at the foot of that article, the ones about Gaia and being past the point of no-return. It is nice to see that someone can also see that we cannot roll this one back--and is prepared to stand up and say so. We need everyone on the earth to shout the same message. Then even the blockheads might take a bit of notice and DO SOMETHING.

'Waiting for the lights to go out' is a brilliant article in one of the world's great newspapers. If you really care about the planet and human existence, click here and read every word.

Meanwhile, the EStarCar aches and agonises to be on the road, so as to help head off the very worst, which is now all we can do. So keep those dollars coming in. For the love of the earth. And the love of human life.

GLOBAL OVERHEATING IS THE SMOKING GUN

The fungal bullet wiping out frogs is being fired by the gun of global overheating, a recent study has concluded.

Surprise, surprise.

But nobody is doing a blind thing about it worthy of the name. 'Everything has changed, except man's thinking.'

Meanwhile a meeting in Sydney tells us that Big Business will fix this global-overheating thing. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha...

PEOPLE-PENNIES FOR THE ESTARCAR GIVEN EXTENDED OPTIONS

EStarFuture has extended its innovative 'people-power, people-pennies for the planet' fund-raising venture, aimed at putting a truly green car on the road long before the Big Iron carmakets get anywhere near one, so that the planet will have a small chance instead of none at all, which is all it will ever get from them.

It is fitting that a car so configurable and user-friendly, and above all planet-friendly, should have highly configurable fund-raising system.

So to the original option of a straight donation to get the EStarCar on the road ASAP three others have been added: 'Buy' a slice of the EStarCar and thus put your name on a slice of green history; buy an EStarCar T-shirt; and become a member of the EStar Foundation.

The EStarCar is to be 4 metres long, which makes 4000 1mm slices, each is priced at $US125. If all 4000 sold, that would be the $US500,000 needed for the project. People who pay for a slice will be issued with an ornate certificate--proof positive of their green credentials.

The T-shirts are $US125 (expensive for a shirt, true, but the money is for the planet).

Memberships of the EStar Foundation are strictly limited to 555 (the number has a nice ring), so it is first in first served. They cost $US500, and last till the end of 2010. Members will have exclusive access to a site that will give special news and details of the EStarCar's progress towards the day when it first hums swiftly down the road--and, of course, all the news ahead of the rest of the world. They will also receive a Membership Certificate. And be on the email list for special announcements.

(There is also a sub-option in the donation section for anyone who might be so wealthy that 'pennies' means what many thousands of dollars means to everyone else. Donors who give $US10,000 or more will have the option of buying an EStarCar at cost when they become available.)

See the earlier post (back in November) for the first post on the people-pennies/people-power venture, and the EStarCar website for more details, and for specifications and images of the car. See also the full press article at Earthtoys, or on EStarFuture's news page (the latter link will be valid only during 2006, in case you are looking at this post from 2007 onwards).

IT WILL ALL BE OK AGAIN IN 140,000 YEARS

A new study, published in the journal Nature and reported by the BBC may well show what will be the result of our global addiction to burning the black stuff--the ocean currents that have made the world what it is will be pushed so far out of kilter that they will not come right again for 140,000 years. But don't worry, all you damned criminals that head the oil, coal, and car industries. It's not long to wait.

140,000 years is how long it took for global currents to come back to normal after the last sudden surge in global temperatures 55 million years ago. That was a rise of 4 to 7 degrees Celsius, exactly the sort of rise predicted by the end of this century (some models put it as high as 14 degrees).

O goody!

FROGS ON THE WAY OUT: WHAT NEXT?

The Geographic section near the start of the latest issue of the National Geographic magazine makes sobering reading. Of the 5700 species of frogs, toads, salamanders and wormlike caecilians that have been assessed, almost a third are threatened, and 168 have become extinct in just the last twenty years.

The 'canaries' in the coal-mine are coughing and spluttering and dying from man-made actions. What next?

For the horrid details the fragile world of frogs at the National Geographic's website.

BUSINESS PLAN OR PLANET PLAN?

Traditional thinkers, the pointy-headed, the bean-counters, the short-term quarterly-results 'thinkers' insist on what they call a business plan before they will move even the tiniest investment muscle. No one should mock planning, for as King Solomon rightly said, 'Victory is the result of long planning.' But there is planning and planning. The traditional business plans, with their optimistic statements or outright lies, their futile attempts to forecast an uncertain future, their notion that everything will be AOK if it has all been set down in black and white in approved textbook style fit to be perused by approved textbook bankers, venture-capitalists or vulture-capitalists, is a notion way out of kilter with reality. Even the textbook method admits that the 'business plan' has to be continually updated. If that is so, why spend six months translating your common-sense, doable, detailed plan of action into Bean-Counter-speak? Only to have to redo it every five minutes?

It is that kind of thinking, that emphasis on BC-speak to the exclusion of all else, which has got us into this global mess. What we need now, first and foremost--what we have always needed--is a planet plan. Is the proposed business good for the planet, and how do you intend making it a better place? The rest is just getting the message out to the people and simple arithmetic. Making a big mystery out of it, and insisting on a certain style of presentation, is nothing but a pathetic substitute for thinking, analysis and the ability to judge ideas and people on their merits.

The Romans had a wise saying about people: 'Two men may do the same thing and it is not the same thing.' So look first at the idea. Is it good? No? Stop there. Yes? Good, now look at the person. Is he the right stuff for the idea? Yes? Go with him.

Most of the world will have heard of Peter Jackson, the New Zealand film-maker whose latest creation, the remake of King Kong, is now roaring across the world. The CGI (computer-generated graphics) for his films were done by a New Zealand company called Weta (named after a native New Zealand insect of largish and fearsome aspect).

Back in the early days the founder of Weta needed $5 million to make his dream a reality. He went to the bank. The bank manager wanted a business plan. The Weta man, who as it happened had gone to school with him, said 'You know I hate business plans.' So the bank manager, instead of flinging him out the door on his non-business-plan head, said, 'OK, let's go for a walk.' As they walked and talked he saw that the Weta man knew what he wanted and how to get there. He had the brain, the skill, the passion, the drive. So the wise young banker said, 'You have your $5 million.' The superlative results you can now see on screens all over the world.

No 'business plan.' But he knew what to do. Too many business plans disguise a lack of ability, imagination, drive, passion, enthusiasm, skill. His real plan was where it counted: in his head and his heart. What was on paper would not have meant anything to a bean-counter. Please, please, look to the man, not the paper.

And look, in particular, at how the man looks at the planet you live on. If you are wise, you will not hand a cent to someone whose enterprise will wreck the ground under your feet or foul the air you have to breathe seventeen times a minute.

PLANNED OBSOLESCENCE IS HISTORY

And therefore, to quote Henry Ford (sort of), it is also bunk. There are 775 million FFVs (fossil-fuel vehicles) on the planet, aka SMCVs (serial Molotov-cocktail vehicles). We need to replace the whole lot if we are to make a dent in global-overheating and avert the worst of the looming climatic catastrophe. That will take a while. So there is no need for carmakers to carry on another minute with their dishonest practices of making cars out of steel that rusts into dust-piles and deliberately changing design-fashions so that people will want to rush out and buy a new model every year or two.

They can make good, honest products. Cars that last for years and years and years.

Like EStarFuture's EStarCar, which is designed, and will be built, to last. If people really cannot live without a new shape every so often, they can get the old body recycled and a new one fitted to the same chassis; or retire the old one to secondary uses, or sell it on eBay, or put it aside to appreciate in value as a vintage for their grandchildren, or turn it into a hi-tech pad for all the little guys from Alpha Centauri that drop in from time to time.

IBM, SONY, FCVs AND THE ESTARCAR

Back in 1974 IBM decided to get into the market for telephone exchanges. To achieve that it wanted a computer--'The Telephone Machine'--that could handle 300 calls per second, which needed 12MIPS of processing power (millions of instructions per second). That was then a huge number--IBM's mainframes chugged away at only 2MIPS on a good day. IBM set up a team under Dr John Cocke at its Thomas J. Watson Research Centre in New York, and the result, astonishly (because IBM had never before had the technology to match its brutal marketing muscle), was a world-beating chip, using what we now call RISC technology (Reduced-Instruction-Set Computer). Even in emulation it ran faster than a System 370 mainframe; it zapped along at 4.5-6 MIPS. But IBM then went off the idea of making telephone exhanges, so it stopped calling the chip the Telephone Machine and renamed it the 801, the number on the research team's building.

By 1978 the team had on paper, and could have launched in 1979, a 3MIPS RISC PC. But to their dismay, and fury, IBM cancelled the project. No wonder. That machine would have outrun its mainframes and midrange machines, and thus would have killed its golden goose. The fact that it would have created a platinum goose did not dawn on IBM's purblind bosses. One person, Joel Birnbaum, was so angry that he left IBM and went to Hewlett-Packard, which a few years later launched what it called Precision Architecture, later renamed PA-RISC. A 3MIPS IBM PC would have wiped out Apple, DEC, and a heap of other companies. But IBM's hierarchy could not see past the outrageous profits they were making on their mainframe/midrange junk.

Then when that same hierarchy saw that Apple was making zillions out of little machines, then called microcomputers, or micros, because IBM hated seeing someone else making money that it considered its own, they decided to make their own micro. They ignored their world-beating 801 chip, and because they wanted a machine that would not, could not, threaten, their mainframe/midrange empire, they deliberately built what they subsequently called the Personal Computer from off-the-shelf, low-power, third-rate bits. They used a chip made by Intel, the 8086, which was only a tweak or two away from the chip that had been invented by Victor Poor, Harry Pyle and Jonathan Schmidt in 1967 at a Texan company subsequently called Datapoint. Datapoint had given the building of the chip to Intel, which explains why other companies can make clones of x86-based chips: Intel did not invent the thing.

And for an operating system IBM went to a boy called Billy Gates--because the then chairman of IBM, Thomas Watson Jr, knew his mother. Billy Gates had a miniscule company called Microsoft, because it wrote software for microcomputers.

To IBM's astonishment when the little machines were launched in 1981 they took off, but because they were built from other companies' products, other companies could use the same products to make better IBM-compatible PCs than IBM. IBM ended up bleeding multi-billions. It resurrected its RISC technology, but it was too late. The world had run after mediocrity.

I IBM had made and launched its RISC PC in 1978-79 the whole Intel/Microsoft thing would never have happened, and the PCs we would have now would be far ahead of what we do have. The world went after IBM PCs because they had IBM on the front, not because they were good. So the world is being held back to the level of its stupid decision in 1981, a decision built on IBM's stupid, greedy decision in 1978.

Big companies get caught up in their own existence, their lust for good quarterly results, their fear of making a loss, their legacy pension-schemes, their self-induced short-sightedness, etc. They lose sight of the real world, they lose sight of aiming for the best, they make things just good enough to con enough people to keep Wall Stree happy this month. Sooner or later they die, because a small company comes along which sees that what the Big Iron is putting off can be done now.

Big Iron is also lazy and greedy. When Sony launched the first portable CD player it was powered by Motorola's 68000 chip. Why not the 68003, which was then the latest version? Because the thing had been born in the Sony's labs about ten years earlier--and if you launch on old technology you then have an easy, cheap upgrade path, and you can keep making the old products obsolete and thus making zillions out the poor suckers who trail along after you buying new models every year or so.

Which is all a roundabout way of leading up to the EStarCar. A fuel-cell vehicle (FCV) can be built now. The Big Iron carmakers pretend it can't, but it can. All the necessary bits and pieces can be bought off the shelf, from here there and everywhere. So watch for an Apple, a small unknown that zooms past the Big Iron, look for a small Walter-Raleigh type of ship that sails nonchalant rings round the big, unweildy Armada monoliths.

Which is exactly what EStarFuture intends being. It has the designs, the mockups, the passion and a vast amount of research under its belt. It lacks only the dollars, which is why it has gone to the people of the planet, because it is their future that is being maimed and broken by the Big Iron carmakers for the sake of corporate bottom lines and blind greed.

A NIGHTMARE OF A BLACK CHRISTMAS

The 2006th Christmas is about to dawn (2005 plus the first one), and still nothing has been done about the ineluctable advance of global-overheating. It is as if people have decided that they want its lethal consequences.

The oil companies are still looking for lakes of black stuff of the liquid kind, black stuff of the solid kind is still being mined in vast quantities, countries are still so looney that they reckon their material wealth on both, long pipelines are still being built here there and everwhere, 775 million machines powered by serial Molotov Cocktails are still being driven about fouling the air on the only planet we can live on in the entire univers... and so on and so on and so on.

The crooner's dream of a white Christmas will become a distant memory as rising temperatures make snow less and less likely anywhere. The skies will grow ever fouler, and ever more likely to erupt with extreme weather.

But, in spite of that, have a merry and blessed Christmas wherever you are, and a happy New Year. Preferably a year in which you do what you can in your small corner to help this tired old globe and its self-beleagured inhabitants.

WHICH FUEL-CELL?

If you are going to buy a fuel-cell, or and FCV, or set your company on a course to use the technology, a PEMFC is the leading type, for very good reasons. Your first question when deciding which PEMFC to go with is 'What are its bipolar plates are made of?'

If the answer is 'graphite', stop talking to that supplier. Graphite plates will most definitely not win the day in fuel-cell technology. Any company making them or using them is going down a technological and financial cul-de-sac, flying into a commercial black hole.

If the answer is 'metal', carry on. Metal plates are cheaper, very much easier to mass-produce, tougher, easier to keep cool, etc. They beat graphite hands down.

Next determine efficiency, the efficiency of output, the efficiency of the cooling and humidification systems, the lifetime of the PEMs (proton-exchange membranes), the output in kW per litre, etc. Cost is the last consideration, and a comparatively minor one, because technical superiority will inevitably result in the best price. Even if the product were the most expensive at the start that disadvantage would not last.

TEN YEARS TO CERTAIN DOOM

Which is a headline that sounds like the cry of some nutter leading his accolytes up a mountain to contemplate the fluff in their navels and wait for The End. But the sentiment comes from the scientist who discovered 'global-warming' (better called global-overheating) back in the 1970s. A radio report has just quoted him as saying that if we get a one-degree rise in the average global temperature in the next decade, irreparable harm will have been done to the planet (sadly, his name escaped a Google News search). Which is a nice way of saying that we have passed the point of no return, because human beings are obviously not going to kick their deep-seated addiction to the Black Stuff in less than ten years.

His sentiments are echoed by the Dean of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies at Yale University, Professor James Speth, who was reported at this site, which might be a bit hard to get into (you might have to click Refresh a few times to kick it into gear). Dr Speth says we cannot now escape negative global consequences. The best we can hope for is to ward off catastrophe.

Meanwhile, one of the Biggies from the Black Stuff, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, Claude Mandil, has just the world that we cannot expect to have more than 30% of the world's vehicles running on hydrogen by 2050--a 30% that is predicted to be 700 million, which would mean that there would be twice as many ICVs on the roads as there are now. Just what we wanted. More of those damned things. The present 775 million have killed the planet. Twice as many does not bear thinking about.

Here is the full article on Mr Mandil's vested-interest prognosis.

Also from the Black Stuff vested interests, on the 2nd of September 2004, Niel Golightly, director of environmental strategies for Ford Motor Company, told USA Today, "Clearly, the entire industry could build nothing but zero emissions cars today if it wanted to." so the whole world is forced to go heavily.

Underlining the planet's peril, and the fact that although computer modelling of climate-change is dire it underestimates the speed at which things are going pear-shaped, is this BBC News item. 14 kilometres a year is 1.6 metres an hour, 26mm a minute. You could stand there and watch it moving.

The problem with computer modelling is that although its accuracy has been proved by running the models backwards and comparing their results with historical records, the predictions based on the extrapolations forward take the mid-line. They do not predict the worst possibility, or the most optimistic. They go through the middle. But the readings are tracking along the top. And as the man says, there are things we have not taken into account.

So we are in for a rough ride, and we are going to get to the rough bit far faster than most people think. It is not a question of avoiding it--we have gone to far for that--it is just a question of how bad we are going to make it before we get sane.

NOT ALTERNATIVE ENERGY

Energy from the sun, the wind and the tides is often referred to as 'alternative energy.' The implication is always that it is some kind of fringe alternative to the real energy, the primary energy, the mainstream energy, which is, of course, of oil and coal. It is only some inferior breed of energy, it is 'alternative-lifestyler' energy, it is hippie stuff that serious people look down on (but which we might one day take seriously when we are forced to).

Bunkum. It is the Black Stuff energies that are the alternatives. And very bad ones. So bad that we should never have used them. Real energy, mainstream energy, is clean. The alternatives are therefore dirty and should be looked down on by any human being worthy of the name.

The wise course is always to take the best way as the main way, and label inferior ways as alternatives that we might use at a pinch. With energy we got it back to front.

The real, the main, the primary source of energy was and always will be the sun. Solar power has always powered the earth. Try switching it off with a nuclear winter (the effect of blotting out the sun with a global nuclear war) and see what happens. It is also the power behind all weather-based energy, such as hyro-electric and wind generation.

BEYOND PETROLEUM!?

BP's greenwashing advertisement in the latest National Geographic highlights this: 'It's time to go on a low-carbon diet.'

Wrong. It's way past time to go on a no-carbon diet. So far past that if we don't go on a negative-carbon diet we shall never get this planet back to being as perfectly balanced for human life as it was before all the Boys from the Black Stuff like BP ever led us astray. But even if we did manage to get into negative-carbon it would take many generations to get 380ppm of carbon-dioxide in the atmosphere back down to 280ppm.

BP (which once stood for British Petroleum) stands for Beyond Petroleum. But so far all that has meant is a lot of petroleum and very little of the 'no-carbon'-beyond.