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