Politics

The UK has just passed The Investigatory Powers Bill. It will become law once it receives the Royal assent – a formality.

It enables a wide range of public bodies to access the records of every person in the UK who connects to the internet. Internet service providers are obliged to keep a record of every site that their users access over the past year.

It’s the modern equivalent of the authorities accessing the record of the library books that a person borrowed.

I am not concerned with whether the authorities can access a person’s predilections for pop music or porn, prison breakouts or paedophilia.

I am, however, concerned that a Government or its agencies can access the records of interesting people. By that I mean that GCHQ could construct an algorithm that splits people into two camps.

There are those people who are interested in trivia – in the diversions of life – and little else. A Government can ignore those people – they aren’t going to object to much of anything.

And then there are a smaller number of people who have a broad range of interests. With the Investigatory Powers Bill the Government will know who its ‘thinking’ opposition is.

Of course, it is not this Government I am worried about. This Government is fair and open. But a more fascist government. If that came to pass they would have all the tools they needed to weed out the potential opposition.

Ah, but this is far fetched. Except that it has happened in other countries.

It can always happen here.

In a 2010 article in the Guardian on the financial troubles in Greece, the Economics editor Larry Elliott referred to the 1997 IMF bailout of Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia. He says:

Asian nations found another way of protecting themselves against speculative attacks on their currencies: they used the devaluations that were part of the IMF bailout packages to export their way back to growth.

The result was that they amassed huge foreign exchange reserves, which they recycled into western financial markets, leading eventually to asset price bubbles. The countdown to the crash of 2007 started right there.

In other words, countries devalued to make their exports more attractive.

That is not possible for countries within the eurozone.

Imagine a country contemplating setting up a common currency with a number of other countries, and the deal was that they would all stump up so much per month to enable them to buy supplies at cheaper prices.

And imagine that one of them spent its income on fancy tables and chairs, parties and high incomes for its workers.

You can imagine how the others would be pretty upset.

If they had been smart, they would have agreed at the outset not to spend more individually than they took in as income.

If they had been really smart, they would have given each other access to their books so that they could all see whether there was a risk that one or more of them was going off the rails.

If they had been super-smart, they would have given a veto on each other’s chequebooks so that none of them could write cheques for more than they could afford.

So why were the Europeans so outraged at the idea that they should introduce this power and tread on each other’s sovereignty a bit?

It took a default by Greece to make the Eurozone countries wake up and even contemplate agreeing to contemplate this.

Hidden Benefits In Default

While Germany was powering away and building up its economy, its banks (and French and Belgian banks) were lending to Greece and Italy even though they knew that Greece and Italy were sub-prime economies.

And they made good interest out of the loans. And then when things got tough, they raised the interest rate to compensate for the risk.

But they created the risk themselves by lending in the first place to an economy that they knew was not paying its way.

When the game was up and the fun was over, Germany and France imposed budget restraint on Greece; the budget restraint that should have been agreed and mutually imposed from the start.

Why wasn’t it? Why is there not a code of practise among nations?

The answer is surely that too much money was being made and no-one in the governments of the rich Northern European nations were able to or wanted to stop their banks making hay while the sun shone.

And when the Greek default loomed? Germany and France and Belgium didn’t say – Ah well, it was good while it lasted.

Instead they got public money from across the richer countries of the eurozone to bail out Greece via the ECB.

Who thinks that is a correct view? Professor Otmar Issing, the ECB’s first chief economist.

In an article in the Telegraph of 16 October he is reported as saying he saw:

the first Greek rescue in 2010 as little more than a bailout for German and French banks, insisting that it would have been far better to eject Greece from the euro as a salutary lesson for all.

The Greeks should have been offered generous support, but only after it had restored exchange rate viability by returning to the drachma.

Where Does This Leave Britain

A couple of weeks ago, Mervyn King, the governor of the Bank of England prior to Mark Carney was reported as saying in an interview with Sky News:

During the referendum campaign, someone said the real danger of Brexit is you’ll end up with higher interest rates, lower house prices and a lower exchange rate, and I thought: dream on.

Because that’s what we’ve been trying to achieve for the past three years and now we have a chance of getting it.

So, four months into the Brexit referendum vote, where are we?

The FTSE is holding up because the UK economy is fundamentally strong.

The pound has fallen because hedge funds have taken their property investment portfolios out of the UK.

And the future? The future is uncertain because it’s the future.

If Trump gets in / If Russia and China take a more aggressive stance together over missiles in South Korea and Eastern Europe / if China confronts other countries more aggressively over sovereignty of the South China Sea / if Ukraine is annexed by Russia / if Brexit ever happens…

I saw a photo today of a city by the sea. Lovely photo – and almost the first thought I had was how the city might be threatened by global warming and the rise in sea level.

In other words, I thought about danger and change and uncertainty.

The ground is moving under my feet. And under the feet of millions of people, to judge by the comments that are swirling around in the news and social media at the moment.

The news is that we are all much more wound up and tense thinking about problems than we were. I certainly feel the pressure.

I think it comes down to parent figures. We want them to take the responsibility off our backs. We want them to keep things on an even keel, running smooth, predictable.

From the perspective of the West, we don’t want relations between the US and Russia to deteriorate. We don’t want to look into what behaviour and what ambitions have brought about the tension across the globe.

We don’t want Russia and China forming new alliances to to oppose US intentions as they see it. We don’t want Turkey and Russia doing deals on gas that strengthens Russian access to the Mediterranean.

And on the other side, we don’t want the US and/or NATO putting missiles ever closer to the dividing line down the middle of Eastern Europe – at least, we want the defence shield and the extra capability but we don’t want to stir up problems with Russia.

We want a better technology that strengthens the defence shield, but we want it invented in the Pentagon with little or no visible sign to ratchet up the tensions.

Geography and territory still rule in all our thinking. We have not moved on in thousands of years.

And when rogue politicians appear, we get all the more nervous.

I think that is perhaps Clinton’s greatest psychological strength – that she appears as a steady hand on the tiller in this dangerous times on the international stage.

But it’s a dangerous game for her to refer to the dangerous times we face. After all, she was Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013. There is always the thought that perhaps things could have been ratcheted down had someone else had the job.

Still, it’s a better hand than Trump can play. He is on the knife-edge of becoming a laughing stock and a hate figure for his attacks on women. And that undermines the image he tries to portray of himself as someone who can talk tough and talk frankly and do a deal with Russia and others.

I think people are getting the idea that he would be ridiculed. Then he would get angry and start posturing in a way that would further threaten the stability of the world.

But he is not an idiot. I think he made credible points at the second debate on October 9th. Here is a link to the transcript of the debate. Search for ‘Assad’ and you will find the section where he says that the US has strengthened Iran, that the US Administration doesn’t know who the rebels are, and that Russia and Iran are killing ISIS.

I think he is missing the greater geopolitical picture in the relationship between Syria and Russia, and that the US Administration are well aware of it. You’ll find that in an earlier article Why Russia has been bombing ISIS

This is a precis of a talk about fracking given by a Dr. Ingraffea, who is a professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Cornell University in the US and an expert in fracking.

Here is the link to his bio at Cornell.

His Talk:
Deep fracking is done by drilling long laterals holes at great depth. The technology is fifteen years old and it is still being developed.

The sheer length of the piping necessitates that water is injected at very high pressure. Water resists being pumped, so chemicals (eight million gallons of chemicals in the case of some wells) are added to make the water flow more easily – this mix is the so-called slickwater.

Once the hole is drilled a cement case is built around it. The cement case around the piping prevents methane from escaping into the the surrounding rock and travelling wherever it will, rather than being extracted via the piping.

The cement is pumped in as a liquid, and if it doesn’t make good contact with the surrounding rock, then methane will escape.

Reasons why it might not make good contact are

• The cement went in too dry

• The cement wasn’t pushed down properly

• Not enough cement was pumped in to reach above existing shallow shale deposits

The centralisers that makes sure cement is put all around the pipe are not placed correctly or at all.

If centralisers – a series of ‘o’ rings that are placed over the pipes – are not placed correctly, then the pipe will not be central in the bore hole and there will not be any cement where it is needed to keep the methane from escaping into the surrounding rock.

The failure rate for inland fracking wells of this type, which are just a few years old – as determined by Schlumberger in one review and by Watson and Bauhu in another – is more than 6%.

The experience from offshore wells is that wells of all kinds have an increased failure rate as they get older – up to 60% for thirty-year-old wells.

The chemicals pumped in to make slickwater include hydrochoric acid,acetic acide, sodium chloride, polyacrylamide, ethylene glycol, borates, carbonates, glutaraldehyde, guar gum, citric acid, isopropanol, and ethylene glycol.

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The Wikipedia page on polyacrylamide says:

Concerns have been raised that polyacrylamide used in agriculture may contaminate food with the nerve toxin acrylamide. While polyacrylamide itself is relatively non-toxic, it is known that commercially available polyacrylamide contains minute residual amounts of acrylamide remaining from its production, usually less than 0.05% w/w.