Peter Nolan

Plane Mad

Brussels is thinking of shoe-horning air travel into the existing emissions trading system.  The ETS has been quite disorderly, with prices for emissions credits rocketing to 30 Euros a tonne earlier this year on cold weather and low rainfall restricting hydro power.  Then, when the member states published their emissions reports, prices collapsed to 10 Euros, as everybody came in comfortably underneath their generous targets.  This chaos is proving a nightmare for anybody who has to make any decisions on investment in power generation or industrial plant.  The system could end up continuing in this fashion, with everybody effectively ignoring it, like the Stability Pact did.  Or, given the political will, we could end up with an unstopable political determination to implement it, regardless of the economic logic - like the Euro.  In the latter case, prices would be upwards of 30 to 40 Euros, enough to add that amount to the cost of a single ticket from Dublin to Brussels: The era of cheap air flights would be over, by command of Brussels.  Some, like the British activist, journalist, pie-thrower and all-round sado-environmentalist Mark Lynas, writing in the New Statesman this month, aim explicity for this:

We could close every factory, lock away every car and turn off every light in the country, but it won't halt global warming if we carry on taking planes as often as we do. A voluntary no-flying movement offers the only hope.

As I wrote in the Sunday Times recently, I can't see Ireland benefiting, given our peripheral location, reliance on tourism and light industry and huge overseas communities moving in both directions.  What are we supposed to do, walk on water?  The cuts in emissions are likely to come at much less cost in sectors where the substitute technologies already exist. 

It is no surprise then that when Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, was asked what people who were concerned about climate change should do, he said: “Sell your car and walk.”

O’Leary is right. Those who are concerned about the environment should focus on power generation and land transport rather than aircraft.

The good news is that reducing emissions is commercially viable already in electricity generation with wind turbines.

At the same time, car manufacturers are developing hybrid petrol-electric engines that can go up to 1,000km on a single tank of petrol as does the Toyota Prius.

For the foreseeable future, however, nobody believes we are likely to see an aeroplane that uses a fuel other than jet kerosene, even on the drawing board.

Dying to win

The one-year anniversary of the 7/7 bombings, in which over fifty Londoners died, is coming next Saturday.  Already the media are publishing assesments of the events and their effects.  The monthly Prospect got in first, with its profile of the Swiss-Egyptian Muslim intellectual Tariq Ramadan.  Today's Spectator uses what is probably the defining image, of the destroyed bus in Torrington Place and has a slew of essays. 

However, on the more serious end of the spectrum, the U Chicago political scientist Robert L Pape, like his polemical colleague John Mearsheimer, is taking aim at US involvement in the Middle East in his book "Dying to Win".  I read the US edition when it came out last year and I thought that it was a seriously flawed piece of research.

Pape believes that suicide terrorists are motivated by altruism towards self-sacrifice on behalf of their families and communities.  I think that this might, just about, if you've your eyes closed, just about hold true for some groups like Hamas or Hezbollah. 

However, I can't see it as being true for Al Qaeda or the 7/7 bombers, whose families and wider communities were ignorant or desperately trying to detach them from a deadly sub-culture devoted to jihad and martyrdom. 

Similarly, Pape is completely correct in pointing out that there is nothing inherently Arab or Islamic about suicide bombing as a tactic - Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers have accounted for more such attacks than any other group ; the Kurdish PKK also use it against Turkey; members of both religious and secular groups in Lebanon took part in suicide attacks against Israelis. 

However, he's unhelpfully blinded by the realists' downplaying of morality or ideology, not noting that while such groups may be diverse in origins, they are united by their attachment to totalitarian ideas for realising heaven on Earth, which are as likely to come from extreme nationalism or Marxism as Islamism, as the Speigel journalist Christoph Reuter found in his journeys among them, where he described one unfortunate Kurdish woman futilely trying to take off her bomb belt or the Tigers enforcing chastity on their "soldiers". 

Pape's analysis also suffers from dismissing the fact that these groups exercise a extreme degree of control over its activists - and that many bombers have undergone a process of coercion and degradation, most visible in the PKK, but also among Palestinian suicide bombers, especially women, as Barbara Victor tells in her book Army of Roses. 

Instead of Iraqis or Palestinians attacking London on behalf of their suffering nations, we got home-grown extremists instead, who would have been as likely to fight Israel in Gaza as they are to play at Old Trafford.  Nevertheless, they are passionately involved to the extent of being willing to give up their lives - like all the most fanatical Man United fans, they act on brand names and not any local loyalties. 

Back from the dead

After declaring that I was tired and that the end of the Black Line had arrived, I have been concentrating on getting published on paper instead, with some interesting and gratifying results. 

However, I still want an archive and I need a homepage.  Also, although the discipline of deadlines and word counts and adapting your style to different publications is very useful, I still think that good blogs, with sources available through a weblink is the most completely transparent and inherently honest form of writing.