Haze. Pea Soup.... let's just call it Pollution.

This last week has been unpleasant so far as the weather is concerned. It is the time of year that Indonesian farmers burn fields to make ready for new planting to take place in a few weeks time. The foliage has dried out so it is much easier to simply burn the scrubby bits left over from last year than manually prepare the ground. So they burn. They don't have to do this and in fact there are laws forbidding this practice, but it still happens and nobody takes action. It's not new news out here but it is in the West. This is what the BBC has to say about it.

Penang is highlighted. The wind here is negligible for the next few days so we will be suffering from this haze for a while yet

It has been going on forever and this is the time of year that it all takes place. For Penang, the areas that most affect us are in Sumatra and with the South West monsoon season here until Christmas, the SW winds that prevail are simply pushing this ghastly messy.... haze all over us. It wasn't anywhere like this last year from memory; apparently it is really bad this year.  Even Bloomberg is paying attention.

I remember growing up the fogs or rather pea soupers in the towns in England. Dense fogs that would hang around for days. For those of you that do not know about these, here is Wikipedia's comment. These fogs were brought about by the coal burning that everyone did in those days (and people wonder why coal has become bit by bit an untouchable fossil fuel) and it wasn't until the 1950's that policy action actually did anything about it. I remember our shirt collars being coated in grime and coughing continuously and the phlegm. Yuk, it was black. Respiratory diseases were prevalent everywhere. I had whooping cough when I was really young and coughs and colds all the time later on.  Pneumonia, TB were everywhere. Mind you every adult still smoked like chimneys.

The tipping point was the pea souper of 1952 which is shown here at Piccadilly Circus. You wouldn't know it was but you can see Eros to the left.

The important takeaway from the above is that regrettably it took 'policy action' to do anything about the pea soupers in England.... aka government intervention by law. I recently read an interview with a very prominent engineer who ran BP for many years (here is the full interview transcript) whose view on the world was from a very engineering viewpoint, of course, but the context was that companies would not do anything until policy makers make them. The technology to fix things is all there but it is not being used because companies don't have to.  Here's an edited excerpt:

JOHN BROWNE: Well ...oil or wood or cutting down forests, but also giving people a very different modern way. So... we’ve created a problem and I’ve been on this point for almost a quarter century now saying... it’s the oil and gas industries that’s created this problem and we need to fix it. And the way to fix it is not to stop engineering, is to apply more engineering to solving the problem...And actually, in this area, I would say that we have already all the engineering processes to stop pumping ... CO2 into the atmosphere and actually even to clean up some of the CO2. The problem is that the ...engineered products are too expensive until they are all rolled out in massive scale because …This is where policy comes in. So in other words, policy has to push these …new engineered products to the point where they become more economical. You don’t have to invent, we need to apply and this is where engineering is very good because as you apply more and more, so the unit cost comes down. We know that for sure. So you need a policy lever... the biggest policy lever you need is a price on carbon. Carbon taxes...have got to be priced high enough so that people can and will actually do something to get it out of the system.

The argument that fixes cost money simply don't wash. This was the argument the car industry used in the 1960's but the lead pollution laws were passed and the issue went away. The car industry is now running pell mell to be the first to produce mass market electric cars.

So all of this is both avoidable and fixable. Granted the developing nations don't want to hear developed nations who polluted away years ago sanctimoniously tell them what to do. But the alternative is pretty desolate.

This week versus normal times

The Year That Was

First of all let me just say Happy New Year to everyone before I forget. As one ages even gracefully, the grey matter sometimes takes a little longer to boot up and connect properly.

I like to read, and that is not an apology, merely a statement, but that appears to be a declining art. It may seem to everyone that the world runs on 20 second sound bytes and a maximum 144 characters of text. That's all the time that anyone has to make a point. Certainly the US President seems to communicate exclusively in this way but even though those of us who believe we are smarter than he is may smugly nod our heads knowingly, he actually knows what he is doing. Well in this regard anyway.

We have had a full 12 months of him plus for an expat Brit like myself, we have had the unlikely sight of another unelectable, this time from the left, morph into the most unlikely next PM of Great Britain that there probably has ever been. All on the back of the highest level of incompetence from the elected elite and a massive groundswell of young support (and social media assistance) from the young people of the country. I read somewhere recently that Jeremy Corbyn has the support of something like 70% of all young people in the UK. And how do they communicate these days? Certainly not in debating societies, major newspapers or God forbid books. It is by 20 second soundbyte and those 144 miserable characters.

I just did a quick count of this blog post and discover to my dismay that 144 characters (includes spaces and punctuation) is about one and a half lines of my text. How on earth do you get your point across in such a limited way?

Perhaps the very fact that communication has come to this depressing and very superficial level will cause a reaction. Certainly I have been reading some commentators who are saying that their New Year's Resolution for 2018 is to come off Twitter or at the very least curtail their usage of it. My contribution has been to delete the Twitter app from my phone... but then again as I have never used it, I don't think that will tip any balance.

Reporting has been never endingly depressing in 2017 underlining the fact that only bad news is newsworthy so I was really, really happy to read an article from a website called Quartz (I was put onto this page by Bloomberg whom I have increasingly come to rely upon for impartial news, even though I still do take some things with a pinch of salt) that listed 99 things to be grateful for that took place in 2017. Here is the link but at random, here are some fantastic things that I never saw in the news but are fantastic, fantastic developments for the human race:

If you’re feeling despair about the fate of humanity in the 21st century, you might want to reconsider. In 2017, it felt like the global media picked up all of the problems, and none of the solutions. To fix that, here are 99 of the best stories from this year that you probably missed.

1. This year, the World Health Organisation unveiled a new vaccine that’s cheap and effective enough to end cholera, one of humanity’s greatest ever killers.

6. Trachoma, the world’s leading infectious cause of blindness, was eliminated as a public health problem in Oman and Morocco, and Mexico became the first country in the Americas to eliminate it.

16. And on the 17th November, the WHO said that global deaths from tuberculosis have fallen by 37% since 2000, saving an estimated 53 million lives. 

21. A province in Pakistan announced it has planted 1 billion trees in two years, in response to the terrible floods of 2015.

27. Eleven countries continued their plan to build a wall of trees from east to west across Africa in order to push back the desert. In Senegal, it’s already working.

30. In 2017, the ozone hole shrunk to its smallest size since 1988, the year Bobby McFerrin topped the charts with ‘Don’t Worry Be Happy.’

35. 275 million Indians gained access to proper sanitation between 2014 and 2017.

46. In 2017, the UK, France and Finland all agreed to ban the sale of any new petrol and diesel cars and vans by 2040.

54. Solar energy is now responsible for one in every 50 new jobs created in the United States, and the clean energy sector is growing at 12 times the rate of the rest of the economy.

69. As plunging crime closed prisons across the Netherlands, the government started turning them into housing and cultural hubs for ten of thousands of refugees instead.

80. You didn’t see this story in the evening news — in June, we heard that the homicide rate in Australia has dropped to one victim per 100,000 people, the lowest ever recorded.

98. One of China’s richest women, He Qiaonv, announced a $2 billion donation for wildlife conservation, the largest environmental philanthropic pledge of all time.

2017 was also the year that saw the passing of a close personal friend of mine as well as some greats of rock and roll: Tom Petty and Gregg Allman from my list of personal favourites. Fats Domino and Chuck Berry also passed away; even greater influences on the history of contemporary music. Sad to lose them all but each time I go somewhere and hear the soundtrack to buying groceries, waiting for the train, being in an airport, etc., and that turns out to be an instantly recognisable tune from the 1960's and 1970's, it makes me happy to know that they will be remembered by their music... even though people may not know the name of their great tunes rather like I recognize much classical music but cannot for the life of me remember who wrote what or when.

But then again this does provide me with an opportunity to ending this post with a wonderful live clip from YouTube with the full original band. I forgot that Butch Trucks, one of the drummers, also passed away in 2017. Gregg is on keyboards and sings.

Happy New Year!