Protest4 Newsletter Out

"Protest4 an end to human trafficking is a response to the issue of sex-trafficking and modern-day slavery. We aim to unite individuals and groups in the fight against slavery in the 21st century"
This is a campaign that is only just getting off the ground, their latest newsletter is posted. No RSS feed yet but I suspect that it will come.

We tend to think that the slave trade is a thing of the past; unhappily not ...
"There are more slaves now than in the entire history of the transatlantic slave trade. There were at least 11 million Africans sold into slavery and exported to the Americas. Today, 200 years later, there are more than 20 million slaves across the world."
This is a campaign I encourage you to shadow and even join in.

Dambed if you do, and if you don't

There aren't enough details really for it to help us to know whether it applies to [which] individual cases or not. But here am I gently losing weight because of a genetic predisposition to high cholesterol and now wondering whether I should be.

"It seems as if the long-term effect of the weight loss is a general weakening of the body that leads to an increased risk of dying from several different causes," said Dr Sorensen. "The adverse effects of losing lean body mass may overrule the beneficial effects of losing fat mass when dieting,"

So now they have to work out if the hypothesis about why "Healthy overweight or obese subjects who try to lose weight and succeed in doing so over a six-year period suffer from almost double the risk of dying during the next 18" is correct, and then work out from that whether there are ways to lose weight that don't incur that risk.



In the meantime the best that can be offered appears to be "If people are overweight, their main priority should be to stop gaining weight and then work on losing some rather than chasing a low body mass index," said Tom Sanders, professor of nutrition and dietetics at King's College London. "If you can stop people gaining weight in their 20s and 30s, it seems to have the best outcome in the long term."

The former, somewhat comfortingly, seems to be my situation. The latter is what I'm trying to convey to my kids.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Overweight who diet risk dying earlier, says study

[Footprint] Let's Get ROCs

Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs) are earnt by green/renewable energy suppliers for the energy they create from hydro, wind, tidal energy sources.

Every energy supplier has to source some of it's generation (about 5%, but climbing yearly) from renewable sources - in other words every supplier has to get hold of some ROCS to meet their legal obligation. This is because earning a ROC shows that you have generated a corresponding amount of energy from renewable sources. Alternatively purchasing a ROC shows that someone else has generated the corresponding amount of energy from renewable sources for you (whether you personally use the energy or not).

So, simply put, if you buy one ROC (and do not sell it on) then you are forcing the energy market to produce a certain amount of energy from renewable sources. In fact one ROC is given for every megawatthour (mWh - 1,000kWh) of electricity generated from renewable sources. It is perhaps typical for a family home to use around 5mWh of electricity per year.

To force electricity suppliers to generate an additional amount of energy from renewable sources, equal to your consumption, would mean buying 5 ROCs at a cost, on the open market, of around £50 each - total £250. This is a rational alternative to producing your own renewable energy using, perhaps, a wind turbine (or five) on your roof.

However, the story isn't over yet! We all consume a LOT more energy than just the electricity we are supplied with. We also consume gas, petrol (or diesel) and basically anything we buy has been manufactured and transported using fossil fuels. Also the services we receive are supplied with the use of fossil fuels.

Now, if each of the suppliers, in the supply chain of the goods and services we buy, were using renewable energy then we wouldn't have an issue - the prices of those goods and services would be higher as they would incorporate the costs of renewable energy. However, on the whole they are not. So what can we do? Again, we really need to offset our indirect energy consumption (the energy others are using for us, to supply the products and services to us) and force an equivalent amount of renewable energy to be generated.

So how do you figure out how much energy was used? Well, unfortunately it appears that most of the cost of goods and services is ultimately energy cost:

• Raw materials - mining costs are largely energy.
• Transport of raw materials, processed components and finished goods - energy.
• Processing of raw materials and assembly of components - energy.
• Human labour - well, their lives run on energy too, so most of their wage is spent on energy and as human labour and people's lives are part of the supply chain they must be included.

So let's pick a figure out of the air - 90% of the money we spend is ultimately to pay for fossil fuel energy. So, if we have an average per capita income of £8,000 per year (which is close to average - remember that this is averaged across all people including children, not just the average income per worker) and that income is paying for energy then we are consuming about 114mWh. To pay for that we need to buy 114 ROCs at a total cost of £5,700 (per person).

Another way of analysing this is to find the per capita energy consumption figures (which I previously quoted here) which is at a rate of about 5kW which, multiplied by the hours in a year gives you 43mWh per year. However, this doesn't take into account the energy consumed for us in imported goods but does take into account the energy consumed by exported goods (which we aren't responsible for as we are not the end consumer). Because the UK imports more than it exports we need to increase our figure for energy consumption, perhaps by a further 20% to 52mWh, which is 52 ROCs at a cost of £2,600 per person.

Let's average the figures we get in the two analyses (£5,700 and £2,600) - £4,150.

So the final result is that a family of four needs to buy ROCs to a value of around
(£4,150 x 4) + £250 = £16,850.

But let's finish with some good news:

1. Seeing as you are now rather poorer you won't actually be consuming as much energy (including buying as many goods and services) as calculated, because you can't afford to! So let's cut the per family figure to £8,000.
2. You get a rebate for the ROCs that you own, at the end of the year: Any energy suppliers who don't meet their legal requirement of renewable production are fined and the fines are redistributed to holders of ROCS. Typically you should expect to get around 30-40% of the cost of your ROCs back - taking your £8,000 spend back down to perhaps £5,200.

So there you have it - renewable energy for a whole family for a mere £5,200 per year (but note high earners are also, typically, high energy users so may have to pay a whole lot more).

Shipman: "excellent doctor" -the mystery of iniquity

We like our mass murderers to be obviously and wholly evil. The truth we find hard to bear is that there still remains a deal of original goodness. "Shipman was a popular doctor among patients because he gave them 'a more personal approach'. Dr Dirckze said: 'He came across as very caring and would go beyond the call of most GPs' duty. 'Very often we heard stories of what he was doing that the rest of us wouldn't dream of doing. 'He used to call in on an elderly disabled patient on his way home after work and would wheel him round the block in his wheelchair.'"
I suspect he did this because whatever had led him into medicine in the first place was still to a degree woven into his identity. We keep forgetting that evil is not ultimate: it is derivative; parasitic on good, which reflects the ultimacy of God who declares creation 'good'. The fact that we are somehow surprised that a mass murderer can also be 'good' in some respects perhaps shows us to be in thrall to a popular dualism, forgetting that evil cannot exist without good; it is far from likely that the reverse is true.
A bit of an irony for theodicy, really.
SocietyGuardian.co.uk | Society | Shipman was excellent doctor, say colleagues:

Mood LED Lighting for worship?

I'm a bit of a sucker for these kinds of things; I like to find uses for them in worship settings. "LED technology with the beauty and simplicity of candlelight."
For me the real issue is whether it would be usable ceremonially. Can I use it as part of the opening of a service? If it's not a living flame, does it lose its emotional and sign value?
Then you have to put it all back together with articles like this one talking about veladoras [prayer candles]. I suspect that there is something 'primal' about the real flame thing that doesn't transfer to a cool LED substitute, even if a part of me wishes it did.
Still, for outdoor use it has a lot going for it.
Philips Lighting - Lighting for the Home:

Hydrogen Wars: Episode II

I didn't realise that oil production required hydrogen and that to exploit the harder-to-extract wells would need even more. So this may be worth considering: "Apply the basic Law of Supply and Demand, add a dash of conspiratorial thinking, and the popular imagination can easily conclude that rapidly expanding the pure hydrogen-fueled proportion of the domestic car fleet would drive up the price of hydrogen. That would mean hydrogen making equipment and feedstock getting diverted to a non-refining market, reducing the variable margin projections for refiners who are planning expansions. Hence, the imagined need to downplay the hydrogen economy talk 'before it gets out of hand'. "

So, is it really true that hydrogen isn't viable?

Why use it to produce oil, why not use it directly?

Check out the article.

Treehugger: Hydrogen Wars: Episode II:

OPEC Oil Producer Switches to Wind Power to Increase Exports

Clearly the price of crude oil has reached a point when it makes sense for oil companies to avoid using it as a power source for their own ops. And the question asked by the report is important:"When major OPEC member countries which get their oil at a fraction of the cost of the rest of the world start switching to alternative energy, isn't it about time for those countries dependent on oil to do more?"



ALTERNATIVE ENERGY BLOG - Solar-Energy-Wind-Power.com: Alternative Energy Venezuela: OPEC Oil Producer Switches to Wind Power to Increase Exports: