David Bennett

Climate Change Action and Corporate Lobbying

Now that climate change is a big issue, how easy is it for a company to swing around and improve its compliance with climate action targets? It probably depends on how energy intensive the company is.

Airlines are big fuel burners, obviously.

Commercial airliners burn Jet-A, which is a mix of refined kerosene and burns at temperatures at or above 49 °C (120 °F). The benefit of using a kerosene-based fuel is that it has a much higher flash point than gasoline-based fuel, meaning that it requires significantly higher temperature to ignite and is therefore safer.

Kerosene, also known as paraffin, is a combustible hydrocarbon liquid derived from petroleum. And therein lies the problem and the reason why airlines are in trouble. There is no easy answer to a substitute for jet fuel from fossil fuels. Biofuels are a possibility, but then the real cost of biofuels has to be costed in. What benefit to mankind if untold acres is given over to producing feed for airliners?

A section in the daily email from QZ mentioned that shareholders at Delta Airlines are being asked to vote on a proposal that Delta reports on its lobbying regarding climate change. The board at Delta recommends voting against the proposal, and the proposal itself mentions that it was put to the meeting last year and achieved 46% of the vote total.

I cannot imagine why the Delta board would be against the proposal if their policy is as they set out in the reasons why the oppose the proposal.

So why, you may ask, did QZ even mention the vote? It’s because according to Influence Map, Delta gets an E in the climate performance rankings.

Influence Map describes itself as:

the world’s leading database of corporate and trade association lobbying of climate policy around the globe. Analysis and metrics on how the world’s largest corporations’ climate policy engagements align with the implementation of the Paris Agreement.

Abut Delta, Influence Map says:

Delta Air Lines appears to have limited, negative engagement with US climate policy. Delta Air Lines has opposed attempts to repeal a tax on jet fuel in the US state of Georgia and appears to support a long-term role for fossil fuels in global aviation. Delta also remains a member of multiple industry associations that actively and negatively lobby against ambitious climate policy including Airlines for America, which has lobbied against national climate regulation for aviation in the US.

To put Delta’s ‘E’ in context, Influence Map covers 100 top companies and gives, for example, Unilever a ‘B+’ and the energy supplier EDF a ‘B’.

The Pull-Up Method For Extending Missile Range

The Korea Herald reported on Apr 28, 2021 that the South Korean Defense Minister had commented on a recent test flight of North Korean missiles.

He was reported to have said that the missile flew 600 km by the “pull-up” method. That was a revision of an earlier statement that the missile flew 450km. So naturally, I wanted to know what this method is.

It turns out it is a way of using the atmosphere and the region above the atmosphere. It is rather like skimming a stone across the water on a lake.

In a normal flight, a missile follows a parabolic trajectory. That’s much as would happen if you were to throw a ball into the air to reach its target.

The pull-up or boost-glide method extends the range by starting with a normal parabolic arc. That sends the missile above the atmosphere on the initial thrust, which then re-enter the atmosphere in the normal way.

The boost-glide comes in when the missile pulls up by altering its wing angle. That aims it back up above the atmosphere. Above the atmosphere there is less drag, so the missile is catapulted forward faster and further on a second arc.

According to Wikipedia, the method dates from 1941 when German engineers hoped to attack America with long-range missiles.

The thing is that time spent in the atmosphere heats up missiles because of the friction drag. The hope therefore was to allow missiles to cool off above the atmosphere between time spent in the atmosphere.

The German idea didn’t come to anything. That was because missiles of the period heated up too much between skips and wouldn’t survive the trip. The Germans revived the idea later in the war, but it never came to anything. After the war, both Russia and the US pursued the idea. That came to a halt with the development of powerful Intercontinental missiles made the pull-up method redundant.

That was until the military realised there was a second use of the pull-up method. In the latest versions of pull-up, a missile might perform a number of skips. That makes it able to travel faster and less predictably, thereby overcoming air defences.

And now full circle to North Korea, which doest not have enough capability to build an intercontinental ballistic missile. It can, however, can use the skip method to extend the range of smaller missiles.

Lots Of Butterflies

I saw a lot of butterflies, but it will take me a while to set the scene. A few years ago I spent a year travelling through Central and South America. On this particular day I took a ride in a big dugout canoe up a broad river. It was a bright, sunny day as they mostly always were. I was in Ecuador, although I don’t recall the name of the river or the exact area of the country.

We passed an Indian village as I could tell from the dress of the people. Our passing must have been something of an occasion because people were standing on the bank. Being in a dugout we were low near the surface of the water. And I recall the way the boatsman spoke to the people on the river bank. He spoke in a normal conversational tone, no louder than if he had been addressing me in the canoe.

I can’t say how far it was to the bank, but much further than one would expect his voice to reach. And the voices of the villagers carried to us clear as day. I thought it was a wonderful thing how sound travels so far across water.

How Many Butterflies

Now to the point of this. When I landed a little further up the river, I was the only person there. I must have intended that as my destination, I didn’t just land without knowing that I had somewhere to sleep. But I don’t recall why I aimed for that particular place. So there I was. I made a fire and cooked porridge. Then I went out and sat on the hillside eating and looking down at the sweep of the river.

Butterflies started to come up the hill in a broad swathe, over my head. They weren’t just milling around. They were heading somewhere and they kept on coming.

At some point I went back to the pan on the fire to put more porridge on my plate. Then I wandered back and sat on the hill. And the butterflies kept on coming.

There are a lot of butterflies in South America. So perhaps I was a little bit immune to seeing them. For example, the wire grill over a bus window would be covered in butterflies that had impacted it. At every puddle in a muddy road, the surface of the water would be covered in butterflies. Often they would be big yellow ones nearly as wide as the palm of your hand.

But the sheer number of butterflies coming up the hill finally finally impinged into my consciousness. So I made a rough calculation as I sat there. I did a rough count of how many butterflies I could see at one time. And I estimated how long I had been there, including when I went to get more porridge.

Bottom line, I estimate that more than ten thousand butterflies flew over my head.

By chance I was watching a TV programme about butterfly migration in the USA, and it described migration by Monarch butterflies, and that is what I am going to go with. I think that is what they were.

Unhappy In The Party

In the unhappy Nazi party every member had a rank, some above and some below. Stick to the rules and you could lord it over those lower. But always you lived under the threat from someone higher. Such unhappiness from pretending you were king, whereas you were just a disposable link in the chain.

I concluded that that was why the uniforms were well styled, to enable party members to live with the distasteful knowledge that they were at the mercy of their superiors. Of course it was not just that their superiors were higher up; that is true in all organisations that have ranks.

The bitter pill for the individual in the Nazi party was that his superiors were Nazis. Nazis started out as bully boys, fighting on the streets. So the threat wasn’t just some theoretical worry of a verbal reprimand or of losing one’s rank. Get it wrong and you could be stood up against a wall. That’s what made it the unhappy Nazi party for each and every member. Even the boss had reason to be afraid.

I read that when the machine gunners were given the task of shooting down massed groups of people in Eastern Europe, they got a taste for it. Or they were horror struck and had to drink to be able to continue. Either way, their commanders learned that they had to bolt down the machine guns. They bolted the guns down so the gunners couldn’t just keep on traversing and murder their own. Once the gunners started, they didn’t want to stop.

Cheka, or The Chekist

There’s a similar theme in the film Cheka, or The Chekist, about a squad of executioners carrying out the orders of the local Soviet in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. First comes callousness, then comes madness, which is a sane reaction to the horror of what one is perpetrating.

There’s a scene in the film where a cleaner is cleaning the corridors, and sees scrawled on the walls by one of the squad ‘Executioner’s apprentice school of the Revolutionary Socialist Party’. To the viewer, we see it was written with poor sardonic wit by one of the squad.

The cleaner lifts her head and looks down the corridor to the closed area. The wheels are turning in her head as she works out what is happening daily down there. She is on the brink between disbelief and of being horror struck when she senses the presence of someone behind her. The leader of the squad is looking down at her, and when she senses his presence she is terrified. And then quickly she takes her rag to wipe off the scrawl. He waits a moment, and then moves on.