Politics

I wrote this in 2017, after the Brexit referendum but before COVID.

I was imagining a scene. It’s the grandees of the Conservative party, mostly men and older. They are watching television in the privacy of their club or a private room at the House Of Commons.

They are beaming. I can hear exclamations of pleasure at what is happening on the screen. It is an episode of Victoria, a dramatised series about Queen Victoria.

She is telling her beastly German in-laws not to try to treat her like a cow to produce children. She tells them off and they step back, abashed. Oh, she is magnificent even In her youth. And now she is on board the deck of HMS Trafalgar and she is telling the crowds how the defeat in Afghanistan is bad, but the Britain has the strongest army and navy in the world and will snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

Ah, so like Brexit. Germany is that horrid EU, and Trafalgar is to be our victory in the new trade alliances that our new (as yet unfound) partners are hungry for. The production of the TV programme is first rate with a big budget.

A thought crossed my mind that when the producers proposed the series, Victoria, that someone in a corridor of power thought it would be just the ticket to prop up the failing morale of the populace.

Coda

And now in September 2021, again defeat in Afghanistan is centre stage for a little while. Or a kind of defeat, but who knows. Certainly British MPs have made no friends in the Biden Administration with cries of outrage at the US withdrawal.

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 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.

Is Taiwan part of China? China has been saying for a long time that it is. The Taiwanese do not agree, and the US takes the side of Taiwan. It is pretty obvious that it is only the presence of the USA that prevents China making a move.

It’s not easy to disentangle disinformation from the truth. The US says that China is being aggressive. China says that joint US and Taiwanese manoeuvres in its own backyard is aggressive. And everyone has an endgame, or at least a medium term endgame. So who to trust for the truth? Maybe there isn’t a truth because the parties involved are making it up as the go along, reacting to information they receive and changing position accordingly. That’s how things get out of hand.

It’s a thousand miles from Beijing to Taipei, and about one hundred miles from the nearest point on the mainland coast to the island of Taiwan. Taiwan has been a vassal state or tribute state of China in the past, and today regards itself as a totally autonomous country with a population of twenty-three million.

The Financial Times

So all that in mind, my eye was drawn to an online ‘Breaking News’ item in the Financial Times of 27th March 2021 that read ‘Exclusive – The US fears that China is flirting with the idea of seizing control of Taiwan.’

And then today I read a report from the Asia Times (Hong Kong) in the the 27 March 2021 edition of The Week that puts a new complexion on matters. There is a shortage of chips, and Taiwan is a world leader in chip production. If a ship stuck in the Suez Canal can cause havoc, what would no chips with everything do?

The Asia Times (Hong Kong)

Here’s the report from the Asia Times (Hong Kong), and a note in passing to the reference to Hong Kong, which slightly surprises me bearing in mind the crackdown from Beijing. I looked at their site (the are online only) and I cannot see a mission statement or ethics position, so I don’t know who they are.

A serious shortage of semiconductor chips is threatening to turn into a major global crisis, says Johan Svensson. The chips are integral to almost all electronic appliances; as technology advances, everything from cars to medical devices requires them. Coronavirus lockdowns were expected to lessen demand for the components, but the opposite happened: a rush for home-working technology, along with the release of several high-profile games consoles, sent orders soaring.

When car manufacturing forecasts eventually picked up, the automotive industry found itself in the midst of a crippling supply crunch; many car brands have been forced to delay or cut production. The shortage is now so serious that it has prompted dire warnings that it could slow down the global economic recovery. What’s more, it risks escalating geopolitical tensions.

There are currently only three major chip producers the world: America’s Intel, South Korea’s Samsung and TSMC. The last of these, by far ‘the most efficient’ of the three, is based in Taiwan – a ‘flashpoint’ for tensions between China and the US. For the global electronics supply chain to be dependent on a country threatened with military takeover by China is deeply worrying. The world’s governments must face this issue as a ‘top priority’.

Is Taiwan part of China

When Britain’s lease of Hong Kong expired in 1997, the parties negotiated an exit strategy and an agreement for what would happen then. Now Britain accuses China of breaking the agreement. I think that is unrealistic. What exactly did Britain think would happen? Hong Kong in the longer or shorter term is part of China, so of course Beijing wants to bring it into harmony with the rest of the country. Any other view is unrealistic or disingenuous.