Rhinovirus

It's lovely to spend so much time with the family. Really lovely. Particularly during lockdown. Oh yes. Another week. So much time together. So many things to do. Er...

Well, at least there's no excuse this time for not doing the holiday homework. F has to research urbanism -- which has led to me imposing IPCC reports about the impact of climate change on cities on him, which he just adored learning about -- and J has The Romans. I'm not particularly confident about my ability to build the Colosseum using loo rolls, so perhaps a mosaic?

Aside from fixing a loose shower head, I'm struggling to think of anything significant I can achieve this week. Ripping out and replacing the entire kitchen, or a bathroom or two, is not within my spectrum of abilities, and nothing short of that will make a significant improvement to the house.

Kate has a plan to arrange the thousands of lego pieces into some sort of order, grouping them -- I think -- by set rather than colour. So that's 7 days of her time to be well spent.

Perhaps I should just accept that the children are happy to play 8 hours of board games a day, that there's nothing Holy about going for yet another walk along th towpath, and see to that shower head.

Postscript

I need not have worried. Georg Cantor established a series of sets of infinities of different sizes. This is rather well explained here. I do not know where the following two sets lie, but I do know that both are infinite, and the the second is a larger infinity than the first. Namely: The number of pieces of lego on the floor of our living room, and the time taken to remove them all from the floor.

I have, of course, not finished collecting lego from the floor, nor will I ever finish.

Well-Rounded

Happy Christmas to one and all!

What a diswonderful year 2020 has been. Here in Hackney we should, before we press on any further, praise the teachers and support staff at Hoxton Garden Primary School, who've been working their socks off to keep the kids both safe, and educated. Perhaps fate intended us to walk past the school today, and cast a rainbow in the sky above.

The teaching profession as a whole seems to have had a rough year, and the new year will be just as bad, I suspect, as what has gone before. We should be applauding from our balconies those wrestling with Google Classroom and trying to keep the class on the straight and narrow at arms length. I've met quite a few of the class, and I've used Google Classroom, so I have some sense of how difficult it all must be. Chapeau to everyone doing their best to educate, home or away.

Having nailed the thanks, it just remains to run through the highlights of the year. Alston Hall, Devon, during Storm Dennis was clearly a major success, in that no one got washed away in a flash-flood, the shopping arrived on time, and though we couldn't possibly have known at the time, a few weeks later Lockdown Part I started, and we were all very lucky to get away for a week beforehand in any conditions. Despite the rain. Can't say we saw much of South Devon, given the weather, but did get to swim a lot, and play a large number of boardgames, which is largely the point of these things.

I changed jobs, from worrying about climate change to worrying about climate change differently. It didn't obviously make much of a difference, though I've finally, through necessity, managed to 'master' home-working, or at least be tolerable at it, such that the quality of my output is not detectably worse. I guess it helps to have a new team. They don't know what I was like before. I like the new, shorter commute, though I'm not entirely confident that my new office colleague entirely appreciates my existence.

K got promoted. F & J got excellent school reports. Everyone had a birthday, which is an odd coincidence when you come to think of it. Tortoises aren't dead yet, and are going to get some fresh topsoil tomorrow -- their annual spring clean and refresh is due.

It occurs to me, as I sit here, trying to dredge up meaningful events from the last year that, for at least the 5th year running, we have totally failed to renovate either of the bathrooms. The kitchen is also falling to bits. We did speak to a builder about these things, so perhaps 2021 is the time for big changes around here. Like, a shower that doesn't leak. The cleaner begged us to throw the mouldy shower curtain away last week. I washed it instead. The mould is cleaner. What can I say? It's a Periodic Table shower curtain. I love it.

In sports news, Arsenal are so appallingly bad that, for the first time ever, I'm supporting a football team in a relegation fight. Take that Arsene Wenger! No more of this mid-table, scrapping for a slot in the Europa League. Now we have something really exciting to play for. I watched a big of rugby and was dimly aware of some cricket happening, though I can't recall any of it.

In cookery news, last week I made my own stuffing for the first time and, undeterred by the result of that effort, I shall stuff the turkey on Christmas Day. Huzzah!

Looking back through photos from the year, other highlights included a trip to Margate (which is a remarkable mixture of slightly grubby British seaside town with liberally distributed dog mess - which you don't really see much of in London - with a really beautiful tiny old town at the core, which, thanks to Kate, we were staying in), Legoland, Lego Dimensions on X-Box One (which really is the most remarkable computer game I've ever seen, despite my general disdain for modern computer games), The Wallace Collection, lots of Minecraft, mud-larking on the Thames, roses in all seasons (plenty in Haggerston Park, even this month), Greenwich, Peppa Pig World, the Green Room in Colchester, a really really cool watch-mender on Ridley Road, traffic calming measures everywhere in Hackney except on our street which re-routes ever bloody car in Hackney down our street, gazing out over Bristol Cathedral from the tallest multi-story car-park in Bristol on New Year's Day (which feels a lot more than 12 months ago), Port Meadow flooded (whenever isn't it?), the boys discovering hair gel, Eardisland and the heritage of Levicks, walking to Wales and cycling to Orpington.

So, there was a pandemic, and a lockdown, but somehow we still got to be.

I leave you with this.

 

Decarbonisation is wrong

Will try to keep this short. 

Saw something recently that talked about "Carbon space" and "G20 countries must reach net zero by 20XX if we are to see any chance of global mean temperatures remaining below Y". I see this week that if nations meet their NDCs (narrator: nations did not meet their NDCs) we could restrict warming to 2.1 degrees by the end of the century. This would be fantastic. Today the UK published it's NDC pledging to cut emissions by 68% by 2030. 

I've been in the climate business a long, long time. I was in the room when the 2006 Climate Change Programme was cooked up. I led a team into action. I walked away from the bloodied battlefield of Copenhagen, scarred but undeterred. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. 

Talking about decarbonisation, 10 years on from Copenhagen, is just wrong. NDCs are wrong. (If you don't know what an NDC is, you aren't missing anything. In 50 years "NDC" will stand for "Nothing Done for Climate", assuming we still have language in 50 years). Telling India to reduce emissions is wrong. 

Carbon pricing isn't wrong, per se, but the conditions have to exist for Carbon pricing to have an effect. Right now we haven't powered a major manufacturing economy without fossil fuels, we haven't produced a ton of zero carbon steel, and the UK has absolutely no idea how to heat >20 million homes without gas (they think it involves 'Heat Pumps' but they don't know how to power 20 million heat pumps, and it might involve hydrogen, but they don't know how to produce millions of cubic feet of zero carbon hydrogen).

This is not a call to pessimism. The UK has made massive steps towards decarbonising the entire electricity grid, and the next big technological breakthrough will be grid-scale energy storage, which will -- hopefully -- enable a zero carbon electricity network, 24/7, at least 340 days a year. Zero-carbon steel is do-able. And not only have we been building zero-carbon homes for decades, but the technological solution* for a zero-carbon retrofit exists, and will improve. The most exciting bit about building retrofit is that it will make your buildings more comfortable and just nicer to be in.

But how are we going to diffuse the technology we need, at the speed we need to diffuse it? This is not a call to pessimism, and this is also not a call for global socialist utopia. Making all patents free will not drive decarbonisation. Trying to impose a global carbon price will fail, because the USA will never sign up to it., and nor will India.

All countries need clean energy, for a multitude of non-climate reasons, particularly health reasons, and economic reasons. A global effort to share what works, pool resources to innovate at scale so that we are building megatonne scale projects and not pointless tiny pilot plant, and reward companies that provide zero-carbon solutions is what is needed.

"Mission Innovation" nearly gets there, but look at the membership trumpeted on the front page. 24 countries and 6 "collaborators", none of whom are companies. Energy innovation is done by Governments and it isn't driven by 'action plans' dreamed up in an intergovernmental brainstorming session. What Governments can do, however, is write some really big cheques. I worry that Mission Innovation exists precisely because Governments want to avoid writing those cheques, and MI is good displacement activity.

What I dream of seeing is the Governments getting the energy industry in a room, asking them what the real price of CCS is, and putting 50% of the money on the table. Those who can't play, or won't play, will soon be out of business.

What annoys me is that this has been evidentially needed since 2009 and still there's no sign of it happen. More than a decade of talking about CCS and "new nuclear power", while new coal plant are built weekly. And with every coal plant built, the pipe dream of a global carbon price recedes.

We will decarbonise eventually, but if Governments were really serious, we could move the dial massively within a few months. Stop talking, stop pledging, build some bloody megatonne-scale plant and work out which ones work best. It really is that simple.

And look -- I got to the end of my rant without drawing a tenuous analogy with covid-19. Well done me.

* To follow

Editing blog retrospectively to make myself look dumber

 It's the Colorado River, and it's Utah, not Texas. 

More news from somewhere

With the news that Arizona has now fallen to Biden's elite commando team and Trump forces have abandoned their tanks and fled across whatever river separates it from Texas, combined with a 50k+ majority in PA and a flipping massive street party in Philly, my angst about the election has abated somewhat. There aren't going to be 38 faithless electors.

Also, there was other, more local, news today. A man leaving his office clutching a box. Crazy times man.

The last 5 or so years have seen, I think, a remarkable change in the way I work. I'm constantly fascinated by professional sportsmen and sportswomen who, by around 38, are retired, having achieved stuff. I reckon I only began to get into my professional stride at around 40. I'm pretty confident now. I can do stuff. There isn't a single Premier league footballer close to my age. Odd.

I can do stuff, in big organisations. The key to doing stuff is (a) being clear what the thing you want to do is, and not trying to do 3 or more things at once, (b) building alliances with the people who have the power to stop the stuff you are doing, though sheer awkwardness, and (c) getting a good team around you. It doesn't really matter if the stuff you want to do is right, or proper, or true. It can't be done without (a), (b) and (c). Even in a start-up, where (b) might not apply, without (a) and (c) you aren't going to make it.

And yeah, persistence. That's something the sportspeople understand. The really, really good ones are largely very very boring, fixated people. They do one thing, really well. They don't have outside interests or political views -- in the main -- because, well, yeah, they are boring, and they only see the thing they do, and they do it over and over and over and get really good. I'd never made it as a professional athlete, body aside, because I don't have anywhere near the level of focus of, say, Johnny Wilkinson. Booting rugby balls over the crossbar, hour after hour after hour. Not mindlessly, but with total focus. Honing his craft.

But you don't have to have Faldo levels of boring persistence to get stuff done. You just have to have ordinary levels. You have to stick at it. You have to observe what doesn't work, and stop trying to bash your head through a brick wall, and find the people you need to work with, and butter them up, and build relationships, and stick at it, and, often, drive change through a series of deeply unsexy small wins, until the whole is unrecognizable from when you started. 

I'm very proud of the work I've done on decarbonisation over the last 5 years. I don't think any particular piece of work really stands out from the others, but the whole is a big step forward, and it was done with lots of other people in my team, plus lots of other people who don't work on decarbonisation at all but without whom it couldn't have been done, and it will, I think, stand the test of time.

It took a lot longer than a year. Any meaningful change that is going to persist, and change a large organisation for good, will take a lot longer than a year. Other than the sort of meaningful change the the chap who crashed to Co-Op Bank into a brick wall drove, or the Carillion Directors new business model for their company -- liquidation. I guess those kids of long term changes can be rustled up pretty quickly. But, I digress.

You can't fix things quickly, without good people, good relationships, a focused plan, and enough persistence that when it doesn't go how you want first time, you don't flounce out of the room with a cardboard box.

I can't remember why I wrote this now. 

Nothing to say

 Until he's out of the White House and Biden is inaugurated I can’t post anything. I’m just too anxious.

The Essay Crisis Prime Minister [redux]

Seeking a 'strategy' at the heart of the UKs approach to negotiations with the EU is as futile as seeking the UK Mars base. No such thing exists yet, nor will it for some considerable time.

I knew I'd heard the phrase "Essay Crisis Prime Minister" before. The label had been applied to David Cameron, who, while not the first Oxford Educated PM with an 'Humanites' degree, was the first to really behave as if has present life was simply an extension his time at Eton & Brasenose. But while Cameron was a mere dabbler, the current PM has elevated Eton & Oxford (Balliol, in this case) to an art form. [And it is not coincidence that the most energetic Tory PM of modern, perhaps any, times was an experimental chemist. Idle brilliance doesn't cut it in the lab.]

A lot of people have spent a lot of time speculating as to what the UKs plan is, vis-a-vis the ongoing negotiations with the EU. Which, it seems to me, misses the point entirely. There is no plan. Pointing out that delaying makes no negotiation sense -- it strengthens the EUs hand -- is looking for method in the madness. But there is no method. Nor madness. Merely an absence.

The PM hates decisions. He particularly hates doing anything that anyone might not like. He rails against the nanny state, the EU, judges, people telling us what to do. The catastrophic delay to putting in place a legally binding lockdown wasn't part of some wild, neoliberal 'herd immunity programme'. It was the consequence of having a moral coward as PM. He would have excelled in the Cowdrey role in the D'Oliveira affair. 

I mean, this is a guy who would rather hide in a fridge than risk being asked a question by a journalist. During a General Election Campaign. When he was seeking the Premiership.

The PM (I refuse to humanise him with his surname, let alone indulge in the purile business of identifying him by his forename) has not decided whether or not we will have a trade deal with the UK before the end of the year. Nor, by his own political strategy -- which has elevated him to PM and won him a stonking great majority -- should he do so. Waiting until the last moment, then jumping whichever way maximises his personal brand has paid dividends, and then some.

The biggest decision taken by any PM since, er, last last-but-one PM -- who decided to call an EU referendum during the biggest downturn in UK living standards in living memory -- will be taken, late in the day, on the basis of what is easy, and what is popular, not what is right.

Meet the new "Essay Crisis" PM, very similar to the old "Essay Crisis" PM. Who, lest we forget, when it came to making the biggest political call in modern British peacetime, opted to shore up his short-term popularity at the expense of 40 years of carefully crafted economic, social and foreign policy.

The PM will do what gets the PM the best, or at least, least-worst headlines the day after he does it. Since we haven't reached, or even got close, to the point that the PM has to make that call, the call has not been made. On the day, he will judge which way the wind is blowing at 3am in the morning, with the essay due by 9am, and make his choice. That is all there is. That is all there ever was.

Shorter

The Ditchley Lecture, as discussed in the previous post, has become something of an obsession as it likely determines my working future (and perhaps the future of Government policy, and hence the country).

The word "risk" is used nine times, but only once in the sense of something to be understood and avoided. And there it's financial risk which, we are told -- because of technology -- is now "more effectively hedged". (If you believe that...)

The word "uncertain" is not used at all.

And herein lies one fatal flaw, which I was grasping towards in my previous post. That the problems we face are problems of uncertainty and risk. A failure to properly understand financial risk caused the financial crisis. A failure to understand pandemic risk caused the current one -- if we had understood the risk we wouldn't have done stupid things. A failure to recognise that climate change is inherently uncertain -- and the uncertainty can lead to very bad, low probability outcomes -- and use a risk management framework to address it, will lead to consequences that far exceed covid-19.

(To be fair, there's a gesture towards this issue in "we need to understand that complex, adaptive systems demand respectful attention, not glib assertions of mastery" but that runs entirely contrary to the rest of the lecture, and the actions of the Government)

The second fatal flaw is that the speech is peppered with references to the public, citizens and society. Yet they are absolutely passive actors. Government will develop the solutions, the public will be lifted up by them. "To help the Forgotten Man" you do not, it seems, need to talk to the Forgotten Man. The Politburo decides what he wants and instructs the machine to give it to him.

It's a remarkably Stalinist approach, as has already been pointed out. There is nothing Conservative in this speech whatsoever.

We will move elements of the Party Apparatus to Teeside. We will purge the the Apparatus of Mensheviks -- the Party has already been purged of Gaukists, of course. But moving to Teeside is not moving closer to the public. The Party will decide what is good for you, and the Apparatus will deliver it.

You are no longer Forgotten. But no one is listening to you. You exist to justify our policies, and to vote for us. That is all.

A distraction

we interrupt the regular service to provide you with a message about contemporary (UK) politics 

For obvious reasons, this year's Ditchley Annual Lecture, given by The Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, is worthy of both comment and analysis.

Superficially it is hard to disagree with the general thrust of the argument, that Government should better reward risk taking, that the Civil Service should have more diversity of thought, that centralising decision-making in London means that the cultural outlook of the majority decision-makers does not reflect the wider cultural outlook of the country, and that the Government is piss-poor at measuring success, and should do better.

But anyone with even a passing interest in UK politics over the last 5 years will have noticed that our politics is now entirely tribal. We are just as split between individuals who identify as pro and anti Brexit as the US is between those who identify as pro and anti Trump. A significant number of former comrades find themselves stuck behind enemy lines - more on the right than the left, where there are plenty of Conservatives aghast at what the current leaders of their nations are doing on trade, security, fiscal policy and common decency yet are unable to align themselves with the Tories/Dems - but on the left, too, though these types are perhaps more used to being out of step with the majority of 'their' tribe. Pro-protectionist anti-immigrant leftists exist, and have existed forever, but are very much in minority, and have been for years.

The lecture is aimed solely at one tribe, and blames their woes solely on a foe with all the realism of Mantel's Thomas Cromwell -- i.e. there are grains of truth, in here, rooted in documented historical fact, but the overall concoction is entirely fictional  -- or perhaps some mythical version of Clive of India as a Hero of the Empire. If I were to ask you what went wrong in 2008, and has failed to go right since, I doubt you'd point the finger of blame at the Civil Service. Maybe you would. Maybe I'm too close. But I suspect the voices that are now claiming the Civil Service is ideologically attached to Europe would, 30 years ago, have claimed that the Civil Service was too slow to adopt to the benefits offered by globalisation. Where politicians lead, Civil Servants follow. The single market was a political creation and one which diminished the powers of Whitehall. It wasn't dreamed up by Mandarins nor do I imagine they were terribly keen on it in the early days, given that power flowed away from them. And we all know that austerity was a political, not technocratic choice. Officials seldom advocate policies which will see their Departmental budgets decimated, or as was the case for several Departments, far worse than decimated.

But I'm going on too long. Many many columns will be written about the impending re-organisation of Whitehall. Here are some others.

But I would like to point out what I think is a flaw at the heart of the argument that we need . It's about Maths and Science. As a physical scientist, I completely reject the assertion that decision-making should be "less reliant on those with social science qualifications and more welcoming to those with physical science and mathematical qualifications".

As a citizen rather than a Civil Servant I've seen policies come and go. Most policies, in my observation, fail or a best offer extremely poor value for money compared to readily available alternatives. Some crash and burn spectacularly, like privatization of probation services, or the Green Deal. Most chunter along, eating money and not doing much active harm or good. Occasionally we hit a great one (in my field, both the boiler regulations, which drove down UK gas use, or Contracts-for-Difference which, in the wind sector at least, have driven renewable electricity prices down beyond our wildest dreams.

But yeah. Policies usually suck. And they usually suck because the real numbers bear no resemblance to the forecast numbers.

So, more numerate people = better policy outcomes?

I'm afraid it's not that simple. There are a lot of numerate people in Government. The Government Economics Service runs the show, so far as policy appraisal (that is, assessment before the fact) goes. They know their stuff. And the Government spends a lot on building complex, often (in my view) over-complex, models to discover the truth.

And there you have it. If your model of the world is wrong, then no amount of mathematics can help you. Let me put to one side any beliefs I have about any given Government's moral model of the world. Let us just assume something morally neutral, like the way people make decisions to buy gas boilers. If your mental model of that "simple" decision is wrong (and, it turns out, it isn't a simple decision at all) no amount of numeracy can dig you out of the hole in which you find yourself. Indeed more complex models (by which we really mean equations, hidden from view, nestling in code) makes it worse, because you cannot easily see (or even difficultly see) where you went wrong, so many twists and turns have you taken.

Big data and machine learning (let us not even pretend that AI has any short or medium term role in policymaking) are a deeper concern. In finance these tools are already used. They make a small number of people a lot of money. They don't, obviously, know anything about the immediate health or outlooks for any given stock, beyond what values humans have already applied themselves, through the buying and selling which provides the data the machines then 'feed' on.

Nothing scares me more than the idea of a data scientist who knows nothing abut decarbonisation using a learning algorithm to find the 'answer' to a complex policy problem. This isn't a joke. If you 'analyse' the data without understanding what real world forces give rise to the data, you can kill lots of people.

If data can be used to provide insights which then allow humans, and most particularly social scientists (I exclude economists from this category), to investigate patterns and find out probably reasons for them, then more power to the data monkeys. But if we believe that the Civil Service is too reliant on Social Sciences, we will fail to generate policy that has a positive impact on citizens, because citizens are rooted in society, and society follows social science 'rules', not the rules of physics.

It took me 9 paragraphs to say that policies depend on a robust understanding of the behaviour of citizens, and that only by properly equipping the Civil Service with Social Scientists - not merely economists - can we ever hope for better policy. That numbers alone mislead without human insight. A lack of understanding of Natural Science, or Mathematics, or Social Science, will lead to choices which, with hindsight, look very foolish.

To illustrate my point with a field that I know something about. Civil Servants, we are told, need to know "how to interrogate climate modelling". Well, the Civil Servants who work on climate already possess this knowledge. Indeed, it is an area where the Civil Service already has deep expertise, and better, can draw on the deep expertise of the Met Office, and others. But that isn't the real issue. The big question is what "interrogate climate modelling" means. It should not mean that Civil Servants should be looking at climate models to better forecast when Hebden Bridge will next flood. Because climate models cannot tell you when Hebden Bridge will next flood. They can't tell you what the probability of Hebden Bridge flooding is. They can't even tell you what the probability of the level of rainfall that last caused Hebden Bridge to flood falling over the next 5 years is. They can tell you what the probability is of that rainfall level occurring according to the model  but (and very few people seem to recognise this) the model is not reality.

What can climate models tell us? Well, if we have a range of climate models all of which can resolve rainfall at the level required to tell us something about Hebden Bridge and floods, we could look at the range of outputs from those models, and perhaps look at how well each model performs historically (a model which doesn't produce weather over the last decade that in any way resembles the actual weather over the last decade is probably a poor guide to future weather). It doesn't give us a numerical probability of Hebden Bridge flooding, because none of the models are reality and the 'average' of all the models certainly isn't a model of reality but it gives us the best possible scientific insight as to whether Hebden Bridge is more likely to flood over the next decade than it did in the last. Which is useful policy-relevant information.

But at this point you can see that it is easy to get lost in the numbers, and begin to believe that the numbers tell you some 'truth'. The do not. They numbers are shadows on the walls of a cave.

I'm not for a moment suggesting that climate modelling is a wasted endeavour or that we should not take notice of the outputs of climate models. It is precisely because climate models tell us that changing the concentrations of GHGs (and particulates) in the atmosphere changes the weather around us that we should pay attention to them, particularly as climate models are significantly more skillful (I don't care what the dictionary says, "skilful" looks awful and both spellings are valid) than anyone who tells you that GHGs don't cause climate change. But our response to climate models, particularly as civil servants, should not be to interrogate the data. It should be to look at the data, and decide what actions are a proportionate response to the evidence available.

What I am talking about here is risk management, at national (and, of course, global) level. The fact that the future is unknowable does not prevent us from making decisions because we can predict, with some greater or lesser certainty, what is likely to happen. I am very uncomfortable with putting numbers on these things, as it gives a false sense of precision. Rather I would suggest we believe that an outcome which all models predict in most circumstances is more likely than one which only some models predict, which is more likely still than an outcome which only one model predicts, and infrequently. (But of course, the low probability event can't be ruled out).

So if "interrogate climate modelling" means understand the strengths and limitations of climate models and use that to develop a risk framework that focuses the available resources for climate change adaptation where we predict they will do most good, and prevents stupid policy (like building in areas which are predicted to be increasingly prone to catastrophic flooding) then I am all for it. But if "interrogate climate modelling" means drilling down into the data to find deeper meaning, then I fear some fundamental misunderstanding of what a climate model is and isn't, has occurred.

I hope by now, if you have made it this far, you recognise that a framework to respond to climate change relies on social scientists just as much as it does on physical scientists (and that mathematicians, while they have an essential role in developing and verifying models, are of limited use when it comes to applying them in the real world).

We live (and continue to live, we hope) in a world of people. If you don't understand people, you can't build effective policy.    

Can you hear me?

2016 – 2017: Buildings (Innovation)

The main thing I learned, which is unsurprising, is that innovation projects are a lot harder to run than research projects. For a start, if a research project goes wrong, you can usually find a way to bring it back on track. That's a lot harder with innovation, where a lot of money can get spent before problems become obvious.

Then there's the commercialization problem. A technically successful project doesn't mean you've innovated. Without a route to market, new stuff just sits in the innovator's shed. To change the world, we need new things which sell.

So, building on my previous work, let's imagine that a couple of million people have used thin wall insulation, but more people can't be arsed, and nobody has a Heat-Pump because everyone has gas, and It. Just. Works. How do you get them off gas? Policy people, because they see everything in terms of policy levers, think you just need to find the right lever to pull. Maybe we can innovate to reduce the cost of Heat-Pumps (this doesn't work - nothing is simpler than a gas boiler, because as a Professor of Buildings once told me, a gas boiler is just a tube with a flame on the end. It's that simple). OK. So we can subsidise people to buy Heat-Pumps. Well, yes, but that's horrendously expensive and only rich people bother, so you are subsidising the heating bills of rich people. OK. Maybe we ban gas? Sure, I say, go ahead. Ban gas.

Energy-as-a-service (bear with my here) completely re-imagines (yeah, I said "re-imagines", so what?) energy retail. Or, put another way. Imagine I can put a small box in your house that controls heating, individually, in every room in your house, and you can programme it with you iPhone. For a fixed monthly cost (just like your mobile contract) you get whatever heating pattern you specify (just like your phone contract, the more minutes you buy -- in this case, warm hours -- the more it costs). If the boiler breaks that isn't your problem. Your provider has to fix it.

Now maybe you are tech-head. You want PV on your roof, a Tesla PowerWall in your cellar, a zero-carbon heating system and a complex low-carbon energy tariff which turns of your freezer for 15 minutes when the power price spikes. Maybe. But most people don't, and don't want to live with that level of complexity. I mean, I live and breath this stuff and I don't want that level of complexity.

In an energy-as-a-service world all those problems go away. Insulation? The service provider installs it if it saves them money (because they pay for the heating, you are paying a fixed price). Complex energy tariffs, batteries and PV? If they make commercial sense, your service provider gives them to you for free. (But they take a cut of the profit they make, of course). When you finally buy that Tesla, the box automatically charges it for you when power price is low. It's a win-win.

And if the builder who fits the insulation, the heat-pump, the batter, messes it up? Not your problem. Your service provider has to fix it, and they fit the bill. So they only employ people who do a good job.

So, we can build the box. The box can even measure how leaky your home is, so the service provider knows what monthly price to quote you. The tech to insulate your house and make it zero carbon exists (Those good builders who do a great job? Yeah, I'm afraid they don't exist yet. But they can learn).

Oh, we tested this stuff. We gave people a free iPad and 24/7 emergency support in case any of it went wrong. People love it. I think we did 25, and 23 of those 25 never wanted it taken out when the trial finished. 94% success rate? New stuff never does that well.

The problem? No idea how to roll out the first 1 million boxes. When people have got the box they won't want to go back. But how do you sell a new product to people when nobody has it, and you can't explain why it's so great?

So there we are. Great tech exists. People will love it, once they get it. It can change the world. But how do we get it to market?

Fascination

2014 – 2016: Buildings (Research)

The UK has a very heterogeneous building stock (i.e. lots of different sorts of building, designed and built in many different ways, and altered in many different ways since originally built), and it’s a very old building stock at that. Over 7 million homes without a cavity wall! We have a very high penetration of one sort of heating system (gas). This makes elimination of fossil fuels extraordinarily difficult in buildings because electric heating is expensive and impractical (we’d need about 10x more power stations to heat our buildings in the winter, but most of these power stations would only need to generate power for 5 – 10 days a year, which makes them a little … uneconomical.)

But there are solutions. Some research I kicked off (yep, I done a thing) showed that a ‘thin’ layer of insulation delivers most of the benefits of traditional solid-wall insulation (i.e. 4-5 inches of battens, insulation and plasterboard) at a fraction of the price.

So there you have it. Insulate those 7 million old buildings, plus any poorly performing more modern buildings, with a couple of centimetres of insulation, and you've already massively reduced heat-demand across the UK housing stock. The costs of installing a zero-carbon heating system (e.g. a heat-pump) are massively reduced. Result!

Who can I be now?

So, a conversation got me thinking. My new role is hardly the pivot Bowie made when he abandoned Glam Rock (Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs) for Plastic Soul (Young Americans). 

As Alexis Petridis put it, “just how influential Young Americans was didn’t become fully apparent for another decade… And Bowie made the transition seem effortless”. 

(Though personally I find the transition from that to “Station to Station” to be an even more remarkable evolution)

I don’t imagine a stint as on climate science will have quite the impact that either of those albums had (and we haven’t even got to Low yet…) On the other hand, I’m ingesting significantly less cocaine than Bowie was during this period. Which is good, as we need to save up for a new kitchen.

Yeah. So, 6 years, 3-and-a-half jobs, a lot learned. I’m not going to talk about what I did (who cares?) but what I learned, which is relevant to anyone interested in climate change, particularly from a UK perspective (though doubtless some of this applies elsewhere, too). I'm going to send a version of this article as an email to my mother and she'll have to pretend to be interested...

Maggots

Maggots, on the work surface. But where are they coming from?

Roasted fox

Monday

Youngest has been foraging for eggs up trees. We are lucky it is springtime. Eggs are plentiful.

Tuesday

.... which is reasonable, plus everyone around here is very much sticking to the 'stay at home' rules, though that might be due to the Hyenas and African Hunting Dogs that escaped from London Zoo and are now attacking anyone who goes anywhere near the towpath. 

Wednesday

OK, so technically I did start the fire but my intentions were good (I was attempting to cure some hides) and the resulting conflagration has wiped out the virus in the area. On the downside, everyone is now living in tents. Thank goodness I managed to rescue most of the hides before the flames spread!

Thursday

 ... senseless violence and fear of outsiders has led to a real sense of COMMUNITY SPIRIT here in Haggerston. I yelled at Marvin on the other side of the street that, "When this is all over Perhaps we should brighten each others day by saying 'Good morning' when we see each other on the street", and he (I think - he are keeping our distance which makes it hard to hear) agreed that this would be a good idea. If it were the morning.

Friday

Digging a trench with a stolen JCB. Meanwhile Kate is ...

Burst of creativity

Everyone is now familiar with the fact that, whilst in quarantine during an outbreak of the plague in Jacobean era, Shakespeare was inspired to even greater heights of creativity than even he had previously reached, and used that time in isolation to draft several pilot episodes of sitcoms, one of which (in the modern era) became "Scrubs".

So, what of us? Well, the youngest has been collecting and cleaning stones from the garden, the oldest has been training a pack of Wolves in Minecraft and I've been picking fights with amateur pandemic modellers on Twitter. So, time well spent.

But I feel the novel stirring inside me. The resolution is unclear, but there's definitely an outline. A bold warrior who stands up for truth on Twitter, and is rejected, then ultimately, after a very long thread about why extrapolating from numbers posted on a reddit channel (whatever one of those is) is no substitute for proper epidemiological research, ignored. Something like that. I reckon I'll have it done by next week, then I can move onto my sitcom idea.

Blogging left-handed

So. On a train. In the rain. (Storm Dennis). 7 year-old wedged into my ribcage. I can hardly type. Does slowing down lead to more considered, better prose? I doubt it.

We are flying (well, training) into the teeth of Dennis. Unwise, perhaps, but there's a futon at stake. Oh, and a holiday. This time last year we were up on Haddon Hill in blazing sunshine. The forecast doesn't support any such trips this half term. Stay in and drink tea, it says.

About to hit one of the most astonishing bits of railway track anywhere in the world. For m Exeter the Victorians (I assume) built the line to Teignmouth on the sea wall. Blood red cliffs on one side, the waves on the other. Thankfully Dennis is blowing off the Atlantic. If the wind was coming from France we'd be in la merde. Or la mer. Either way...

Did I mention that The Great Western Hotel at Exeter St David's has stopped serving Stilton garlic bread? Damm shame. Still good beer, mind. Even in this weather Exeter as an alternative to London is very attractive. Devon is beautiful.

Dennis will have blown himself out tomorrow. Perhaps we'll make it down to Brixham to smell the sea.

Dawn In Hackney*

It is a crisp, clear morning. You can’t quite sea the Eastern horizon and the sunrise from our house, as we face North-South and the new flats all down the street are too tall. When we moved here, if you stood on the toilet and poked your head out of the top bathroom window you could see the Gerkin. So long as you remembered to put the seat down first, otherwise you’d end up with a wet foot. No longer. The new flats block the view.

Still, looking at the back you can see the rising sun reflecting off the wall of the gasworks. Actually, they aren’t gasworks anymore. Town gas is long gone. Coal no longer makes it way up the canal from Limehouse, to be coked and sent back down, presumably bound for homes that still burnt things, but wanted a smokeless fuel.

No more coke. It’s bad for you.

But for a moment, Hackney will still and silent. I’d been standing on the balcony last night, listening to the sirens in the distance. I like the sound of sirens. It means life. Something is happening out there, even if I’m just standing on a balcony, hanging school jumpers on an airer. Still I enjoyed this peaceful dawn, when I was the only person in the house awake (for a little while) and all the washing for the week has been done, and it’s time for the first cup of tea of the day.

There isn’t a cloud in the sky today. Not one.

* With apologies to Dawn from Hackney

Into the Sea

The combination of wine, Suede and having only just put the chips in the oven is a potent one. I have at least 10 minutes spare to write something.

Suede always makes me want to write. I think it's because it the band meant something to at least 3 of my closest friends at different times in my life, even if I was more into Pulp. (As an aside, the newish album, The Blue Hour, is excellent). The band certainly featured in a piece written by J-P, and J-P was a far better writer than me, something of an insipiration. No, more than that. Definitely an inspiration. Quite a lot of the time I write because J-P wrote, brilliantly.

But what to write? I can't just dwell on Britpop. Coming Up was released 24 years ago. We can all play the game. 26 years before coming up was ... Exile on Main Street. Though personally I'm not a particular fan of Exile. Hearsay, I know. Anyway, Super Fly was released in 1972 and Super Fly is the film soundtrack. Nothing else comes close.

Brexit is irreleavnt. I realise I am far more excited about the 6 Nations starting than Brexit. This is not to suggest that Brexit isn't important, or shit, but 31st Jan is irrelevant in the grand scheme. It's the slow puncture, not the crash, the matters. And England play in Paris tomorrow. Bread and circuses. But it's a good circus. And as a Civil Servant, I'm not going to run out of bread any time soon.

Such cynisim. Can I come up with something uplifting? Brett Anderson is crooning about a picnic on a motorway, which rather sums things up really. No, it's not that hopeless. The boys are wonderful. K has painted over all the horrible marks on the paintwork on the groundfloor and as such the house looks immeasurably better. We are off to Devon in a couple of weeks. It will be fun.

But where is the connection with the universal? Well, I might have some news in that direction but nothing is confirmed yet, so I'll hold fire for now...

Trade remedies

Given the current complexities of the international situation I've been studying rules of origin, the WTO mandate and jurisdiction, and a history of trade from the Phoenicians to the present day. It's all very interesting. For instance, herring fished off the coast of Sidon after 576BC were required to carry a PF (Phoenician fisheries) badge and go through Customs checks in Sardinia if they were to be traded West of Rhodes. From this humble beginning comes the phrase "Beware of pre-Greeks bearing fish", which survives in many of the Viking established settlements of North-East England, and around the coast of the Ireland of Ireland,to this day.

Archaeological evidence is scarce, but it's clear that lack of a properly functioning WTO appellate court in 1200 (due to a dispute over the number of Swedish vs. Danish Judges, and also a funding crisis brought about by the collapse in the price of olives) was ultimate responsible for the collapse of the Norse settlement in Greenland. Unable to trade Narwhal skulls the colonists were forced to emigrate to Glasgow and open fish n chip shops, using potatoes smuggled by Erik the Red from North America. The Portuguese and Italians dispute this claim, of course, but they never stop banging on about Christopher Columbus and 1942.

Where does this all lead us? Well, it’s pretty clear to those of us who’ve been watching the multiple integrated hierarchies of BiteCoins, politics, media, communications, olive oil as a currency, politics, identify vis-à-vis a means of being, popular music and contemporary project management cultures that something is going on. My theory, which is worth about as much as anyone else’s, is that it’s all very complex and we should probably stock up on dried goods, lamp-oil and jigsaw puzzles (other analogue entertainment systems, such as Snakes and Ladders, are available to while away the long nights as civilisation collapses outside). A well fortified stockade could come in handy, if you have one to hand.

That’s not to say the end if nigh. From the rubble of the collapse of the implosion of the downfall of modern culture new forms will emerge. We’re already seeing that with the return of Crackerjack to kids TV.

I have to go and sing now, so I’ll leave you with this. What are you doing? No, seriously, what on earth are you doing? Put it down! This instant!!

Thank you.