Carbon Capture and Storage (is a bad idea)

For a few years now I have been hearing about Carbon Capture and Storage.  I always thought I should read up on it to see what its all about.  I figured (incorrectly) that it was about planting lots of trees.

Carbon capture is about fitting a device to a power station and extracting the carbon and then pumping that carbon into the empty spaces left by mining the gas and oil.

As illistrated.  Now clearly there are a few issues there:

Firstly its not the trees I was expecting,

Secondly it only on power stations that have been converted,

Thirdly the medium term cost (when the station is decommissioned the equipment is useless),

My MP asked what I would consider to be a stupid question:

"What assessment has my right hon. Friend made of the overall job creation potential of CCS over the next five to 10 years? What will he do to ensure that such jobs are created right across the regions, and not just in the areas local to the plants?"

How can a scheme to fit a filter to a power station create jobs across a county?  There are no power stations in his area so in part he is fishing for some more jobs for his voters.  However if jobs were created for CCS in a region where a power station did not exist surely that would lead to more carbon from travelling to the power station?

This form of carbon capture is like the tobacco companies putting filters on cigarettes, it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling that its not all that bad.  However cars, planes or domestic heating is not covered by this form of capture.

Of course a utility bill will go up because a percent of the energy produced then has to go to power the filter and then pump it out to sea and back underground.  Then there is the capital cost of building the equipment and the off sure platform to pump it.  Oh an in case you were wondering about the existing platforms, they only have a short life and need constant maintenance.

All in lets say 300million could be spent on converting a power station, probably either through taxes or higher bills, then spread that over 10-15 years.

For that same money you could get 6,000 homes completely off grid and producing no carbon for heating or electric.  That would also have a net effect of:

1, Making solar equipment cheaper,

2, Producing no toxins during use (ignore initial manufacture at the moment as that is covered by other laws)

3, Flexible power (cars, heating and devices can use it)

4, Local, as in less dependent on a national grid

5, Protection from foreign price rises

Carbon capture via trees I think would also be great, however it would need to be a global scheme as we could plant load and the USA none and the trees would soak up their CO2.

Preauthentication and email

Ok, a significant part of the Internet is devoted to spam/junk emails.  Never has a day gone by in the last 10 years where I have not had a single spam email and that is with the best filtering you can get.

My brother reported to me yesterday that my dads business deals with 20,000 spam attempts per day. Perhaps 3 to 5 get though.  Which statistically is fine but for a user its annoying in the first place.

At the beginning of the decade their was a flirtation with pre authenticating people with whitelists of known people.  This died out as people hated having to email to say yes this is valid and it broke mailing lists.

Now I prefer instant messages because of that pre-authentication is built into the protocol.

For email to survive it needs to evolve.  Claims that changes that break existing functionality need to be pushed down.  You cannot make an omelet without breaking some eggs.

Email servers need to store whitelists, they need to get the whitelists from their users.  The same system that instant message clients use is absolutely fine.  More and more I am using instant messaging for business, given another 10 years and I would expect it to be the majority of the time.

Defaulting on your mortgage

The greedy goblin (which is a blog mainly about World of Warcraft) also gives out economics advice.  Today's was indeed special:

http://greedygoblin.blogspot.com/2010/01/walk-away.html

Basically if you owe more than your house is worth, stop paying the mortgage and walk away.

Which on the surface looks socially irresponsible because it would lead to wider poverty and we are told as a species we need to work together...

However after reading the whole thing it lead me to think that those that did act irresponsible were the bankers and they are the ones that are living the high life...hummmmm

The article makes a point that if you were in negative equity of 100k and you pay that off, you are feeding the bankers.  If you walk away you save yourself the cost of 100k loan.

I personally am not in negative equity so cannot pull this trick off but it did get me thinking about moral obligations and is our sense of duty wrong?

Copenhagen Summit

The Copenhagen summit it taking place this week:

http://en.cop15.dk/

Its basically the worlds politicians getting together and agreeing what is to be done about the climate change.

This morning whilst watching bloomberg they had the CEO of Ryanair saying "Don't be stupid trees need C02" in response the the question of the growing levels of pollution which the aviation industry is responsible for.

From a statement like that clearly shows how uneducated or selfish the man is.  Clearly trees do need CO2 to grow, but if there are not the trees to take that CO2 where does it go?  His comment also utilised the word "Stupid" which clearly shows that rather than debate the issue he just wants to bully his audience.

It is a shame that the head of a large company clearly would only reduce pollution if he was forced to do so.  At the heart of it there is a capitalist which is denying rational thought because money is at stake.

Whilst many businesses are asking for a reprieve from climate issues, I think its the wrong time.  A recession (we are not in a depression) is a time for a spring clean, people loose job and new industries take effect.  Those that are most scared of change are the larger more set in their ways businesses.

Should the government veto the bonus bankers get?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/poll/2009/dec/04/rbs-bank-bonus-hester

It appears that I am at odds with the vast majority of the poll. I am part of 6% that believe RBS should not have its bonus payment fund limited.

Most people are still angry about what has happened and think that the bankers have screwed us over.  We that maybe but we are way past that now.  The British government OWN that bank. 

Now if I owned a business I would want the best and brightest working for me.  I would not want those that could not get a job working anywhere else, because my business would sink like the titanic.

If the government limits the bonuses given by RBS to its staff, the top 10 to 20% will leave for Barclay's or any of the 100 other banks that will pay the going rate.  The business will suffer and the 56 billion pound investment will be lost.  In 5 years time the money we put into the bank could be worth 66 billion or it could be worth 46 billion. 

By removing the top 10% to 20% of staff which way will OUR investment in the bank go?

If people want to punish fat cats then do that via a tax, if you want to prevent the same thing happening again read history (this is a natural cycle).

When I heard that we were bailing out the banks and taking ownership of them I was not worried because it was an investment, in the future that asset would be worth something.  However now we see that the papers and politicians are going to destroy that asset because of an emotional response to someone driving a better car than them.

Break dns to end scam emails

The internet domain name system allows for almost unlimited naming convention, with the exception of the top level (which will soon be anything anybody wants).

Scammers exploit this by sending emails with the following server names:

http://www.mybank.alliance-leicester.co.uk.iksadd.org.im/

On the surface you get the Alliance and Leicester name so if you are not savy you think your at your bank.  No 99% of legitimate use will not have more than the 3 parts:

www ==> server name
alliance-leicester ==> domain
co.uk ==> Top level domain

The scammers here have 4 sub-domains ( mybank.alliance-leicester.co.uk. ) added to help them pull off their fraud.  Surely browsers and email clients could warn when we have even 1 sub-domain?

Theres a clever idea

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/01/demos_music_survey/

So getting to page two they note that the survey results suggest rather than cutting people off for file sharing you should charge them a £30 fine each month.

Brilliant.

The media industry just got customers for no infrastructure cost and a regular stream of income.  Cutting people off or suing a few for £200,000 has done nothing, they surely never see that money.

There will always be hardcore pirates but the few that are borderline will be converted into monthly paying customers.

Recession as a good thing

Reading a news article earlier this morning made me realise that recession is actually a good thing.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2009/oct/14/bear-stearns-pair-fraud-case

In a sense the fraud that bankers perform is caught out by the recession.  A recession is like a detox, we look at all that is wrong and fix it.  Then we go on another binge, its a natural cycle.  One of our Prime Ministers phrases whilst he was in-charge of the economy was that he had ended boom to bust.  Which is an outrageous claim for one man to make even before the recession.

Time are hard but that is sometimes needed to make you appreciate the good times.

Ban websites

A new feature I would like added to my web browser is the ability to ban a website from my search listings.

Just recently I have been looking something up and I visit a site which imediately does not show me what I clicked on but a full screen message asking me to become a member.

http://www.daniweb.com/
(No link as I do not want to promote them)

This just enrages me, I close the pop-up, and hit back without even reading the site.  Why be an indexable site if your just going to annoy people with prompts like that.  It failed to provide me with what I expected to see and in a sense tried to sell me something.  How would you feel if you switched on your television and before you could watch anything you either had to click no or enter your personal details.

Grrrrrrr.

I know natural selection will allow these sites to die, putting barriers to entry is a sure fire way of killing a site.  Friends reunited did exactly what facebook does now.  But friends reunited tried to charge, fail.

I will be interested to see what happens when news organisations start charging for access (as Rupert Murdoc has said he would), the reporters need paying but I can only see the blog-o-sphere being the new uncensored media.  Which is good and bad at the same time...

Executive pay, sigh...

People are looking at executive pay in the news right now and asking people about what they think:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/poll/2009/sep/14/executive-pay-bonuses

Problem with that is that its very narrow options and Bias:

Should pay be capped at 100x the average salary?
Should pay be capped at 10x the average salary?
Should pay be capped at £5,000,000 per year?
Should there be no restrictions on pay?

Clearly the last option is framed in a negative way.  Personally I would choose none of the above (however that was not an option, oddly).  I think a hard limit like these is unnatural.  I would not like a system that penalises winners and puts them on the same level as mediocre executives. 

Which might make you think that having a pay as a factor of the average would be good...WRONG... think about it in a global context.  China could have a director earning £10,000,000 per year and paying an average employee salary of £1,000 per year.  Where would you rather work if you were a director and good at your job?  Which would leave England with mediocrity...look forward to that.

At the end of the day democracy is built into businesses via shareholders, the government need not get involved.  Shareholders (you and me if we care enough) should decide the compensation to executives and just make it so that shareholders decide AFTER directors have done well, not before as the system is setup now.  Shareholders have Annual General Meetings (AMG) in which these things could be voted on.

Job done, no need for newspapers, politicians or anybody else.  I should run for Prime Minister!