The poor will still be with us in the future, according to a futuristic video by Microsoft’s Office Labs team – but at least technology will be able to keep our distance from them.

The video is called “Microsoft Productivity Future Vision” and the blurb invites us to “Watch how future technology will help people make better use of their time, focus their attention, and strengthen relationships while getting things done at work, home, and on the go”. it’s as exciting as it sounds – a clean and clinically soulless world in which nobody talks. “This video encapsulates everything wrong with Microsoft,” noted John Gruber when it was released a few weeks ago. Much of the technology demonstrated is already here: screen sharing, augmented reality, and multitouch desk UIs.

But something intriguing caught our eye.

A professional at an Asian subway station (the sign says Sai Ying Pun, Hong Kong) sees a video advertisement of a beggar. It’s part of a charity appeal. He points his Porta-phone at the advert and makes a pledge. The virtual beggar thanks him.
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Marvellous: how much cleaner and less malodorous the future promises to be. It does raise the awkward question of where the beggar actually is – if not on the subway? Perhaps on the fund-raising equivalent of the human-powered factories in The Matrix, a chugging farm?

But what shocking imagination and lack of human ambition is on display here. Instead of a world in which need and suffering has been conquered, they portray one in which it’s still here – but now the poor are far away, and assuaging your guilt has never been easier.

It seems ridiculous today, with climate sensitivity models being tuned downwards, natural variability recognised as increasingly important, and climate institutions talking about a period of long-term cooling. Much of the urgency went out of the window after countries failed to agree on a successor to the Kyoto agreement at Copenhagen in 2009, and the costs and taxes of “low carbon” strategies are political poison.

But back in the mid-noughties, it was very different. The idea that the climate was reaching a “tipping point”, and that global temperature would runaway uncontrollably, was rife. It created a sense of urgency that helped pass legislation such as the UK’s Climate Change Act in 2008.

This story emerges from the FOIA2011 archive – the so-called Climategate 2.0 emails released last week. Although it hasn’t had the immediate and dramatic impact of the first leak two years ago, the breadth of social networks uncovered in these emails will keep historians busy for years – and whets the appetite for the 95 per cent of UEA emails still under wraps.

How ideas divide science and us

The idea of climatic tipping points is fascinating for several reasons.

The question of whether ecosystems are inherently stable – or unstable – preoccupied biologists for much of the last century – and was the subject of Adam Curtis’s film The Use and Abuse of Vegetational Concepts, in a BBC series for which I was assistant producer, and which Curtis summarised here. Fashions change, and so do myths. Arthur Tansley, who invented the word “ecosystem”, believed in “the great universal law of equilibrium”, and this was pursued for decades. Today, the idea that ecosystems are delicate and unstable instead dominates.

The idea also divides scientists. Geologists, for example, point to evidence of long-term cycles, and stress continuity and predictability. For example, we roughly know how long interglacial periods last – we’re in one now, which is due to end fairly soon. And the idea also divides us. If you are of the view that mankind is a disturbance to a natural order, you’re much more likely to believe in runaway effects. If you’re of the view that nature is here to be tamed for our benefit – an idea born out of the Enlightenment – you’re more likely not to panic.

In 2000, New Yorker journalist Malcolm Gladwell published a mish-mash of ideas that nevertheless spawned a buzzword. Gladwell found a common metaphor that could describe – but importantly, not quite convincingly explain – things as different as the spread of diseases, social behaviour (crime waves) and best-selling products. The phrase “tipping point” was everywhere.

Both Gladwell and Tansley were really making grand, metaphorical generalisations. Gladwell borrowed his idea from epidemiology, Tansley from the idea of the human brain as an electrical circuit. Both became universal “theories of everything”.

Into our story comes the magnificent Hans Joachim “John” Schellnhuber CBE, a German physicist and social networker, whose stratospherically high opinion of himself is not, it seems, shared by the climate scientists at the University of East Anglia. Today Schellnhuber is climate change advisor to the president of the EU Commission, and boasts of regular chats with Chancellor Merkel. He was a climate advisor to Tony Blair.

By the late 1990s Schellnhuber was a powerful and influential figure. Having founded the Potsdam climate research institute he was able to influence the establishment of a UK equivalent, the Tyndall Centre, and UEA was bidding to host it.

On his blog, Andrew Montford relates the tale of how Schellnhuber helped hand the Tyndall award to UEA, then took a post as its research director. This was a full-time job, but Schellnhuber concurrently held a full-time job at Potsdam – leading to incredulity from his new colleagues at UEA. “Even a very competent person could not possibly hold down two responsible, full-time jobs like this,” writes former CRU director Tom Wigley, in amazement.

Schellnhuber had become fascinated by complex systems and non-linearity, particularly the work coming out of the New Age-y Santa Fe Institute. (He formally joined the Institute last year.) This was deeply influential. What he saw terrified him: a world out of control. Let this hagiographic profile of Schellnhuber pick up the tale.

Schellnhuber

“In a conversation with a BBC journalist, I said ‘these are, more or less, tipping points’ [in climate change]. He immediately understood,” Schellnhuber told his profiler.

Schellnhuber capitalised on this with a paper, Tipping Elements in the Earth’s Climate System, co-authored with several others. Despite its speculative nature – “subsystems indicated could exhibit threshold-type behavior in response to anthropogenic climate forcing”, we learn. It has been cited over 500 times.

The death of the planet has been greatly exaggerated

Amongst the subsystems discussed are the Arctic sea ice, which could take 10 years to disappear, the collapse of the Gulf Stream (10 years), and the greening of the Sahara Desert (10 years). None look likely today, with global temperatures fairly static (or falling slightly – depending on how you fit the curve) for 15 years.

It was a deeply pessimistic point of view. But Schellnhuber welcomed the climate apocalypse, because he saw human beings as the planet’s enemy – and the planet must come before human life.

“In a very cynical way, it’s a triumph for science because at last we have stabilised something – namely the estimates for the carrying capacity of the planet, namely below 1 billion people,” Schellnhuber told a conference in March 2009. Such a neo-Malthusian vision could only be turned into reality with unprecedented coercion and repression.

Earlier I referred to two competing views of the relationship between man and nature: the enlightenment view of optimism, of taming nature (and looking after it responsibly), and man as a destroyer. Schellnhuber’s pessimism belong firmly in the latter school, and that’s the view that’s dominated policy-making for 40 years. There’s a problem, in that it isn’t one shared that’s by the public; few parents or grandparents pray for their offspring to be worse off, or more less free.

There is little doubting Schellnhuber’s success both as a social networker and an influencer. At the height of the climate panic a few years ago, the sense of urgency became all encompassing, and convinced politicians and the media that these were extraordinary times, requiring extraordinary measures.

He was able to do so because of the media’s familiarity with a book aimed at the marketing business – and some sweeping generalisations. The irony of the story is that by over-dramatising the climate change debate, Schellnhuber may have had the exact opposite that he intended.

Tech startups that can truly be considered game-changers are rare – especially in Shoreditch. The more hype that the Silicon Roundabout “leisure startup” scene receives, the more painfully apparent it is that the emperor has no clothes – see these comments for example. Which is a pity, for less attention is paid to genuinely creative British tech startups.

I’ve rarely seen something as startling as Muvizu, the PC software from Digimania which allows a seven-year-old to start creating something a lot like Toy Story. The startup emerged from the ashes of the DA Group, which was previously Digital Animations. New investors took over the ashes and had an idea.

Perhaps the 3D power of games engines such as Unreal could be put to make a genuinely easy-to-use, consumer-level animation software. The development team had the chops for this; it was the team behind animated newsreader Anna Nova, for those of you who remember the first dot.com boom. And so Muvizu was unveiled two years ago.

You can get a glimpse of what you can do with it from this video – our sister site Reg Hardware reviewed it recently here.

It’s still a tiny startup in Glasgow, with a core team of half a dozen developers, but since then it has added a clutch of features: you can build your own models and characters, edit timelines, move cameras, create custom textures, and introduce anti-aliasing. Huge libraries of animations and art assets are now available. You can’t import your own characters – but you can customise with textures.

It has notched up 138,000 downloads since August 2010, CEO Vince Ryan tells us. Muvizu took a community approach – and it is a lively place for users to share and swap assets and collaborate. It’s useful for anything from 30 second funnies to in-house training videos.

But with no visible revenue, I was curious to see how Muvizu was paying the rent. Long-term it makes an enviable acquisition target for an Adobe or a Google – but for now it’s looking to collaborate with animation companies, toy-makers or TV companies that want to extend their brand to their fanbase, allowing them to knock together their own stories and content.

A new version is due on 19 December.

One civil servant wrote to Phil Jones in 2009:

“I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story. They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.”

Having elevated global warming to the most dramatic, urgent and over-riding issue of the day, bureaucrats, NGOs, politicians and funding agencies demanded that the scientists must keep the whole bandwagon rolling.

It had become too big to stop.

“The science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run,” laments one scientist, Peter Thorne.

While Professor Jagadish Shukla, a lead IPCC author, IGES founder, and one of the most senior climate experts writes that:

“It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.”

With the release of FOIA2011.zip, the cat’s now well and truly out of the bag.

To their credit, some of the climate scientists realised the dangers of the selective approach politicians demanded, which meant cherry-picking evidence to make it suitably dramatic, and quietly hiding caveats.

“We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest,” pleads Thorne, in another email from 2005. Thorne noted that a telltale “signature” of greenhouse gas warming was absent:

“Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous.”

Elsewhere, discussing the homogeneity of temperature readings from different sources, Thorne mulls the need to “balance the text so this is not the message”, and expresses his discomfort with making claims that conceal the uncertainty. But such were the demands of activists, agencies and the political class, uncertainty was not on the menu.

This was why the first Climategate caused such repercussions. The revelations came as little surprise to those few who follow state of temperature reconstructions, but they rocked supporters who had put their trust in climate scientists. Clive Crook, a believer in the manmade global warming hypothesis and supporter of carbon reduction measures, expressed it like this:

“The closed-mindedness of these supposed men of science, their willingness to go to any lengths to defend a preconceived message, is surprising even to me. The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering.”

Where the “intellectual corruption” is plain is that somehow these doubts and uncertainties, along with the limitations of using computer models as evidence, never made it into the “bible” of climate science, the reports produced by the United Nation Organisation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.

“Basic problem is that all models are wrong,” writes Phil Jones, bluntly, “not got enough middle and low level clouds.”

If that’s the case, then why isn’t this printed as a large health warning on the cover of the IPCC reports? Politicians who devised policy based on estimates of certainty by the IPCC now know they’ve been sold a pup.

In the short term, the issues raised by Climategate I, which subsequent inquiries failed to explore, are back with a vengeance. Parliament looked at several issues including transparency – withholding code and raw data to allow third parties to replicate CRU’s temperature work – corruption of the peer review process, poor quality programming, and the destruction of internal emails. Since CRU’s temperature work was at the heart of the IPCC, this is troubling. Climategate II finds Phil Jones telling the University of East Anglia’s FOIA climate officer that:

“I wasted a part of a day deleting numerous emails and exchanges with almost all the skeptics. So I have virtually nothing. I even deleted the email that I inadvertently sent. There might be some bits of pieces of paper, but I’m not wasting my time going through these.”

Adding:

“I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process.”

His colleague Keith Briffa – expressing doubts about “all temperature reconstructions” also appears to ensure such doubts are not on the public record:

“UEA does not hold the very vast majority of mine [potentially FOIable emails] anyway which I copied onto private storage after the completion of the IPCC task.”

Elsewhere Briffa adds:

“But for GODS SAKE please respect the sensitivity here and destroy the file immediately when finished and please do not tell ANYBODY I sent this. Cheers Keith.”

Some context is worth remembering.

As with the first Climategate archive, much of the correspondence focuses on modern temperature trends and historical temperature reconstructions – not on the stuff we call hard physics: the behaviour of greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere. (Note also that the emails stop in 2009.)

The temperature work was only thrust into such a dramatic political role because of the state of the hard physics of climate. There’s broad agreement amongst supporters of the manmade greenhouse gas theory, and ‘lukewarmers’, on what an increase in CO2 should do to the Earth’s energy budget – a modest increase in temperatures, before any feedbacks are taken into account. But speculation about runaway temperatures, while entirely legitimate, is for now, just that.

In the absence of telltale manmade global warming “fingerprints” (and there have been several candidates over the years, such as the tropospheric hotspot, or elusive ocean heat sinks) contemporary temperature readings and historical temperature reconstructions were freighted with immense significance.

So the mewling infant that we call Climate Science – a 40-year-young offshoot of meteorology – has been thrust into a political role long before it’s capable of supporting the claims made on its behalf. From the archives we can see the scientists know that too, and we can read their own reluctance to make those claims, too. As one scientist muses:

“What if climate change appears to be just mainly a multidecadal natural fluctuation? They’ll kill us probably.”

That won’t be necessary.

Craig Venter

“Rely on the sun and the other eco-friendly things that Mother Earth has given us. We need to stop being dependent on the corrupting effect that is oil now!”

– HuffPost Super User “ProgressivePicon86″

The next energy revolution is coming – and promises the biggest disruption since the industrial revolution.

Today we assume that oil is a finite resource. The “Peak Oil” argument, for example, is not that it runs out, but that conventional sources run down, and it becomes prohibitively expensive. This obliges us to think about re-ordering society. The other assumption is that the exploitation of fossil fuels creates the rapid release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, changing the climate. Along with this, too, are arguments for re-ordering society. But with the next generations of fuels, these assumptions go out of the window. Policies based on these assumptions lose their relevance and appeal.

This promises a fundamental change in how we think about man, industry and nature. Just as Karl Marx anticipated a future of machines, where manual labour had been replaced by automation, we need new political thinking.

Replacing oil, however, isn’t so simple. The problem is that oil is a terrifically energy-dense material, and useful in many other ways. Entire industries are founded on the byproducts alone, such as fertilisers and plastics. We tend to take this for granted.

But what if oil could be created in your backyard? Or by your children as a school project? What if we thought of oil as a renewable energy? What if it was a low-carbon renewable? With cheap hydrocarbons it becomes just that, and within 15 years much of our oil will be produced this way: it’s simply an open bet on who’ll get there first.

Algae: the new bio-engineering workhorse

“We can engineer, humbly, like we have been domesticating plants for a long time,” one scientist told me. “We engineer the algae to do biochemically something quite different to what they’d be doing in the wild: they still take photons from the sun, and via biology, turn it into a useful captured molecule. We have them doing something similar but with stunning efficiency: it’s 40 to 100 times more efficient,” says Elbert Branscomb, chief scientist to the US Department of Energy.

There are (at least) around 60 startups hoping to produce oil and diesel biologically, with accelerated fermentation or photosynthesis techniques to produce an end product that is 100 per cent compatible with the existing infrastructure. Some, for example, tweak the algae to make them do photosynthesis anything from 40 to 100 times more efficiently. LS9 received $30m in funding and has a one-step process to convert sugar to create renewable petrol. It expects production within five years. If oil prices remain high, say over $40 or $50 a barrel, then it’s viable.

Craig Venter is proposing an even more radical way of creating biofuels. He’s genetically modifying algae to take CO2 and convert it to renewable, compatible fuels. The algae can’t survive in normal conditions, but need around 20 times the concentrations of the trace gas to start work. The idea is that CO2 will be pumped out from power stations directly into his plants.

After years of watching synthetic hydrocarbons with suspicion, Exxon has put substantial funding behind Venter to the tune of $600m. Venter doesn’t see a return within 10 years, but it has obvious appeal to those still concerned with climate change, and who realise it’s a low priority for BRIC countries (including China and India) that are determined to industrialise as quickly as possible. Venter’s renewable oil kills two birds with one stone: removing CO2 and creating a low-carbon renewable alternative to excavating the stuff.

The quote you see at the top of the article could have been picked from any of the thousands of comments left on message boards and in comments sections every day, urging us to “wean ourselves off our oil addiction”. It’s a potent substance that creates quite a passion, and some strange alliances. You’ll find people who’d normally cross the road to avoid each other suddenly breaking out into agreement. Tree-huggers who hate our technological consumer culture find themselves allying with red-blooded free market capitalists who want economic independence from the Middle East.

What the synthetics revolution means

There are several fascinating consequences of a world in which oil is created in tanks, rather than shipped around the world, which are quite dramatic.

Firstly, one of the key reasons of conflict is resource contention, and conflicts over oil in particular. The consequences of these conflicts include famine and migrations. A lot of human misery can be attributed to the desire for oil. But renewable oil is local, and so there’s no need to ship it around the world. And since it’s no longer “finite”, there’s no reason to squabble over it.

So we’re looking at major consequences for foreign policy and defence policy. The palette of nations we feel comfortable with changes; and the nature of what we feel we have to defend changes, too. Anyone who has made the call for “energy independence” will be thrilled, since two-thirds of the energy we use comes from oil and gas. Shale gas, too, is a local resource for many countries, and is already changing geopolitical dynamics.

Secondly, it has major consequences for business – and not just in nations who today bank on excavated hydrocarbons. The 10 largest companies in the world are all oil companies – and all are privately owned.

Thirdly, it will bring about a fairly profound change in the political debate. Synthetic hydrocarbons are not some magic bullet that suddenly catapults society into a future of boundless prosperity, although they don’t half help. Everything has costs and consequences, and the sheer value of oil doesn’t change. In the short term, oil companies will be faced with large cleanup costs from conventional extraction.

But the greatest challenge cheap hydrocarbons poses is for people whose outlook is founded on what I call “End Times logic”. The most successful political movement in recent years is environmentalism, which expanded from specific concerns about pollution and conservation into an all-encompassing worldview, complete with very preachy appeals to changing parts of our lifestyles.

These ranged from “Don’t flush the loo too often”, to “Don’t fly for a weekend break”, to “Eat less red meat”. Very few politicians have felt courageous enough to contradict this. And the movement has achieved its ascendancy through urgent, apocalyptic appeals, rather than using calmer methods of rational persuasion which involve costs and benefits to be totted up. These new energy sources pose a profound problem: they saves the planet, and we carry on with minimum disruption.

I expect that one effect will be that environmentalism will become much more about everyday concerns such as pollution, and conservations again, back to where it started. But it grew into a vacuum, after the end of the Cold War, when great political ideas seemed to lose credibility. As a way of driving the political agenda, it will become currency without value. Buzzwords such as “sustainability”, founded on a resource-constrained view, will no longer be credible. People will simply laugh at them.

So, then. Oil as a low-carbon renewable energy source, one your children can grow. And planet saved.

What’s not to like?

This may not be what the corporate sponsor Google, which benefits from internet piracy and fights enforcement proposals, had in mind when it funded the research. Google is currently leading the opposition to the new SOPA legislation in the US, which obliges service providers to take greater responsibility.

Perhaps, as in Brecht’s poem, Google wishes “to dissolve the people and elect another”, until they get the answer they want.

Columbia University, who Google funded to conduct the survey, has a very hard time spinning it favourably for their corporate paymasters. They resort to the old trick of rephrasing the question until it got the desired answer. (Statisticians sometimes do something similar: it’s called “torturing the numbers until they confess.”)

Asked if websites should be “censored”, 46 per cent said yes, and 49 per cent said no. Fewer agreed if the question was posed in a way that implied legal content was being accidentally blocked. And asked if “the government” should “censor” websites, the number fell still further, with 36 per cent in favour and 64 per cent disagreeing.

The researchers stopped short of asking whether the public approved of the government unlawfully kidnapping their children while they censored websites and burned the Holy Bible just for fun, which is a pity. But you get the general idea. The answer depends on the question.

Two UK surveys have both shown strong public support for stronger law enforcement for online infringement. Even pirates agreed with the proposition that they were doing something a bit iffy, and would stop.

Which brings us to what wasn’t asked in the survey. There are some serious omissions.

In the UK, a mere 11 per cent disagreed with the statement that: “It is important to protect the creative industries from piracy.” But remember this new study is Google-funded research; they don’t want vital context like that spoiling the numbers. The same UK survey also showed that whacking free-riders is popular; 51 per cent polled in the UK thought serial copyright leechers should be punished more strongly, including many “pirates”. That question wasn’t asked by Columbia, either.

The survey instead asked if people had ever committed online copyright infringement, and the answer tells us something we already know: many people have, and the number rises among under-30s. It doesn’t ask if this is a regular occurrence, and how much is casual and how much is “hardcore”. The survey does ask how much of people’s personal collection is pirated, but what would be more useful is a “flow rate” (like the GDP measure), not the accretion, so we haven’t really learned anything about habits or behaviour.

The researchers instead ask whether the public like any of the punishments on offer, and guess, what? They don’t really like any of them very much.

Early data from France suggests most people stop pirating after just one letter, the number of people who have received two is tiny. Spending money on recorded music is now optional, and the copyright industries hope that people who love music go back to buying more, rather than spending the “saved” cash on beer and other entertainment, as they are free to do now. This is the justification for the legislation.

(Which is clumsy stuff, as your reporter never ceases to point out; there are other ways of discouraging anti-social behaviour than blocking sites).

No industry research into piracy is ever believed by opponents of digital copyright enforcement, the so-called “copyfighters”. This is for two reasons: studies have in the past have notoriously exaggerated the economic impacts of piracy for tactical reasons. Much like alarmist Greens, copyright groups want the threat to be seen as exceptional, requiring exceptional action. But secondly, pirates don’t want to acknowledge that piracy does anyone any harm – so they block their ears.

“What’s that you say? Never paying for anything hurts the creator? That can’t be true. And oh, I can’t hear yoooou!”

In fact, that seems to be exactly what happened here.

“I can never understand computers. It’s a very middle-class thing”, Smith tells Mojo magazine in an interview.

Smith also berates people for using online banking and for Web2.0rhea: “You always thought people are daft but you give ‘em the benefit of the doubt, but they are as f**king daft as you thought.”

Has he got a point? Well, statistically he’s correct: some 17 million Britons are internet refuseniks – and whenever a new “initiative” flies in from Martha Lane-Fox to put this “right”, we can’t helping thinking that Smith is onto something: a traditional Fabian distaste of the proles.

Lane-Fox, the lastminute.com co-founder who was voted Britain’s most over-rated entrepreneur, is on a personal mission to brighten the lives of people on “horrible council estates” – people who prefer shouting across the street to tweeting and real communities to online communities.

“I don’t think you can be a proper citizen in our society in the future if you’re not online,” reckons Fox.

This is why people own Staffordshire bull terriers. It’s not a lifestyle choice; it’s a necessity.

Source: Mojo interview.

The article finds the minister on the defensive about shale gas: it’s why he’s taking his argument into print. Huhne doesn’t like this exciting new development, but he doesn’t have the power to kill it. He welcomes it through gritted teeth before explaining how many handicaps could be put in its place: the ownership of the land, the regulatory framework, the planning hurdles, and so on.

(France has bowed to its powerful nuclear lobby by imposing a moratorium on unconventional gas exploration, but since France’s electricity is already so cheap – the cheapest in Europe, in fact – it doesn’t need shale anything like as much as the rest of Europe does.)

Huhne writes that the Coalition’s energy policy is “technology neutral” – a claim guaranteed to invite widespread public ridicule. The UK’s energy policy is anything but “technology neutral”. It’s full of measures created by lobby groups for their respective energy sectors.

There are several of these. The most recent is a “carbon floor price”, which was pushed heavily by a nervous nuclear industry, and introduced by the Conservatives this last year. This handicaps fossil fuels. Another is FITs, or feed-in tariffs, which legally oblige energy buyers to acquire energy at a vastly inflated price over market rates.

The largest, and oldest, is the Renewables Obligation scheme, which legally mandates electricity buyers acquire energy from a list of environmentally-correct sources such as wind, solar and Anaerobic Digestion, with an annual quota set each year by central government. The RO scheme also creates a big bureaucracy to ensure suppliers comply, and an additional complex money-recycling scheme in which suppliers who fail to conform buy their way out. And if that isn’t enough, on top of that, an insurance pool (called a “price mutualisation ceiling”) for buy-outs who fail to cough up. Clearly, there are a lot of vested interests to be appeased in keeping all these expensive and complicated shows on the road.

And they all have something in common: they’re the beneficiaries of the minister picking winners (or more accurately, given the meagre operational efficiency and cost per watt of wind power) picking losers. It’s anything but technology neutral. New, unconventional gas doesn’t require any subsidies at all. It makes a positive fiscal contribution to the Exchequer, and, all things being equal, means public spending can increase, or taxes elsewhere can be cut.

And a vast price-mutualisationation ceiling currently standing at £233m.

The former Guardian journalist twice resorts to a straw man argument – the sure sign of a weak case.

“Some therefore argue,” claims Huhne, “that we should abandon everything else and devote ourselves wholly to shale.” [our emphasis]

We’d very much like DECC to substantiate that claim, for to our knowledge, nobody has ever made it. Gas is simply part of an energy mix: a “diverse and balanced” portfolio that Huhne himself says he wants. “We should not bet the farm on shale,” he concludes.

Source: Household Energy Price Index (HEPI) E-Control and VaasaETT (Prices as of June 2009)

Recently European ministers have also committed themselves to meeting CO2 targets. The way they’ve gone about this, by favouring technologically backward energy sources, greatly compromises the primary two objectives of cheap and reliable energy. Cheap power is no longer feasible, ministers reason, and electricity supply may become irregular, or intermittent, because we must meet the targets. But this is simply mistaking means and ends. There are other ways of addressing this than by handicapping the entire economy.

It’s now very much a live political issue. Shale gas presents an existential crisis for many of the most dogmatic Greens, because it brings these issues to the fore. The problem for Huhne is that his “cure” looks worse than the disease.

Big media companies would like the freedom to use artwork they find on the web without having to worry about lawsuits or negotiating market rates with creators. The web is awash with unattributed “orphan works” – and thanks to cheaper technology, social networks and self-publishing, there’s more being published than at any time in history.

There’s also a strong case for releasing enormous amounts of cultural work that doesn’t have a traceable author, and institutions such as the British Library would like to release this and commercialise it. These are also, confusingly, called “orphan works”.

The problem is, how can you release these cultural works without imperilling the professional market or the rights of amateurs whose work can end up as valuable front page commodity?

The British Library’s Ben White went head-to-head with Paul Ellis of the photographers’ insurgency group Stop43 – formed to fight orphan works legislation in the Digital Economy Act last year. It was feisty stuff and neither would back down.

While the snappers had carefully thought about the cultural problem – and had a proposal to encompass it – the British Library’s White had no time for the photographers. He favours compulsory extended licensing – which confiscates their digital copying rights – for the greater good. It works in Canada and Japan, he says, and if there are problems with it, they’re not apparent.

Ellis pitched the proposed National Cultural Archive, which would be an online marketplace that you can upload any picture to and Getty’s PicScout image recognition software will find similar artwork that’s available – be it royalty-free or with a price tag. This is useful if you have an image of unknown origin, or a picture you can’t use for copyright reasons, but would be happy with something similar.

Ellis likened the system to the proposed Digital Copyright Exchange marketplace, but described it as “rather more ambitious”. The copyright exchange was put forward by Ian Hargreaves, who led the so-called Google Review into intellectual property.

“Everyone is now a photographer. Those of us with Facebook accounts are published photographers,” said Ellis.

“Amateurs can match professionals… a photograph you take that appears on a front page has great commercial value – so why should you not participate in that value?”

The British Library sits on a lot of great material and has a powerful moral case for making its archives more widely available: that is its mission.

But it doesn’t seem to be able come up with an argument that avoids making other people worse off as collateral damage; worse, it seems oblivious to those consequences. This makes the library look extremely arrogant, and it projects a tremendous sense of entitlement. “We can see how orphans could harm anyone,” they argue, “but that’s not our problem.”

A good litmus test of any claim of digital rights is whether its success causes avoidable collateral damage to other groups. Should one group lose just so another can gain? MPs were a bit more aware of the complexities of the debate, after this week, and quite a bit better informed.

In the meantime it seems bizarre that Facebook and the BBC are able to strip metadata from photographs that are uploaded to the site en masse. They know the authorship of almost everything uploaded to the site – but then throw that away. They’re “orphan creators” on an industrial scale.

And it’s fascinating to see big publishers, who complain long and hard about internet piracy, suddenly twig the financial benefits of rolling over copyright.

Yarr!

Now we know why what was widely called the “Google Review” into intellectual property came to the conclusions it did. And we have it from the horse’s mouth: not Google, but Professor Ian Hargreaves and his team at the IPO, who “guided” him.

If you recall, a year ago the Prime Minister David Cameron revealed that the Google founders that they could never have founded Google in the UK, because of its copyright law. Even Google could never substantiate the quote, or provide a citation. Rather than getting a public inquiry, and shaming, of a foreign corporation for misleading our PM so badly – Google got the government to explore how the law could be altered… to benefit companies like Google.

So the review began with a mistake, and its guiding philosophical idea was a naive, simplified, and fantastical version of the world. This set the tone for what followed.

Hargreaves came across as wry and likeable, as he always does, but his words revealed the bien pensant view of the internet, its potential, and its commercial challenges.

“Politicians are afraid to address [copyright] because of fear of damaging the entirely legitimate and desirable wishes of musicians and other creators to have a fair level of protection, so they can make a return on their own work. I do disagree how this machinery has spread, and become an undesirable regulatory restraint on the internet [our emphasis] and the internet’s effects on the economy“

He continued:

“That is a very, very big risk for an advanced knowledge economy like the UK to run. In my view we can’t afford to run it. It’s urgent; the government has to take the action I have recommended it take”.

The sky was falling, he’d felt a piece of it land on his head. And he hammered home this urgency in his conclusion, in case you missed it:

“The digital revolution is not one-third complete, based on the penetration of the internet around the world. If we don’t ‘Get with the Pace‘, we will pay a significant economic price.”

There are several flaws to this approach.

The graph below illustrates the recent commercial fortunes of two technology companies. One of these has negotiated with incumbents and innovated to establish platforms that create new markets. It didn’t lobby for the rules to be changed. It worked with what rules there were. It created an explosion of economic value.

The other company, by contrast, lobbies intensively for the rules to change (one of the recipients of its cash shared the stage with Hargreaves), so its costs can be lowered. It’s why we were here. The first is Apple, and the second is Google.

Now, what this shows that there is more than one approach to dealing with incumbents and the legal and regulatory status quo. The empirical data here clearly tells us that platform creation within the rules is not only possible, but actually far more lucrative than the slightly sleazy backroom business of lobbying for the rules to be changed. It also demolishes the “pace” argument – which is an appeal to the Precautionary Principle: that if we don’t do something drastic very soon, we’ll face a far greater cost. (See Iraq, WMDs). By creating markets for digital content, Apple ran counter to the perceived wisdom of internet gurus that people would never pay for it. Newspapers have followed suit with paywalls, with some success. Apple killed Free.

Hargreaves’ view of internet growth is based on one particular view of the world – and it happens to be one one that isn’t very good at producing growth. Hargreaves is evidently a decent and intelligent man, he is just basing his judgments on a view of the world that is Utopian, and feels very dated. This leads to the other problem, which is that his argument is based on exceptionalism, and makes demands of groups that it shouldn’t.

Viewed sociologically, the argument is that one group needs to become weaker, just so another can prosper. History shows that time and again, technological innovation allows many parties to prosper – no technology content market has yet done otherwise, or removed rights. If I was an internet guru, I would call this the Orlowski Principle, and Tweet it like mad. But it’s actually the way good policy is conducted since the Enlightenment.

Yet for some reason, Google prefers to seek to change the rules rather than create new markets. Your speculation on why they adopt this approach might be is as good as mine.

This Google isn’t working

Google isn’t very good at consumer products, as the late Steve Jobs told Larry Page, but it should be able to do large scale platforms. Maybe it isn’t very good at doing the negotiations – with finance and creative industries – needed to push this through. Maybe all of its best ideas are invisible. Maybe it doesn’t do ideas. Maybe it’s innately fearful and conservative – as large record companies were for years, clinging to the CD, and failing to create digital markets or physical replacements.

Google is still a one-club golfer, and that club, its advertising brokerage, doesn’t really begin to unlock the potential value – as Apple’s content store has shown. Whatever the reason(s) may be, academics such as Hargreaves seem not to have really taken these developments on board: they appear only too keen to endorse Google’s view as the one true way of achieving growth.

For Hargreaves, the internet creates such a unique, singular moment of historical anxiety, we can suspend traditional ideas of fairness. It shouldn’t make us deaf, though.

Read more at The Register.