Out for our 3rd weekly shop.

Exploring the pandemic situation, continuing from:
• "Covid-19: a deadly wake-up call to exponential growth?"
• "Covid-19 (Part 2) - Daily Updates"

Index:

• 2020-04-18 Sat - Misplaced Animosity
• 2020-04-19 Sun - Divided States
• 2020-04-20 Mon - Food Shortages?
• 2020-04-21 Tue - Through the floor!
• 2020-04-22 Wed - Perspective
• 2020-04-23 Thur - More Science Sumaries


► 2020-04-18 - Misplaced Animosity:

[Daily Mail]

• I've been somewhat horrified at the general appetite (seen in posts from of some of my old Facebook friends) for martial law and/or capital punishment, effectively. I.e. marking anyone taking an unnecessary walk in a park as "not for treatment", in the case they ever get infected. Punishment fits the crime grim poetry.

That last coming from one of the most caring individuals I know, in response (I believe) to a litany of pictures like this one (right), from the [Daily Mail]. Flattened, zoomed in perspectives making everyone look far closer together. Seemingly just trying to stir up resentment and outrage, for viewership and quite possibly to undermine public solidarity and help usher in crony capitalist friendly authoritarianism (for the papers owners).


Above is closer to the real story of public spaces - drone footage of Birmingham city centre on a sunny Saturday afternoon. It's usually heaving with crowds, but is now deserted! [Twitter Video]


It also looks like over 90% of rail travel is gone, 80% of London bus trips and 65% of other road travel too (right). [BBC]


78% of people self isolating, as of the beginning of April [Ipsos MORI]. Pretty impressive adherence to measures (and an unprecedented economic change).

Despite all this, UK public is still being focused on the rare black sheep amongst us, and bad optics in occasional photos and videos. It's our 10'000 year (or so) old memetic predilection for social scandal, coupled with a cognitive incomprehension for relative scale and rarity.

As I'd expected, it's taken a realistic long term economic forecast for the UK government to start taking a serious stance against climate change. This was provided by Sir Nicholas Stern in a big ole report suggesting that a single stitch today could save between 5 and 20 in the coming century (so to speak)... reported at BBC & Slashdot

I distinctly remember the Blairster casually laughing off a suggestion of fuel taxes on aviation fuel/airplanes (on some documentary or other) as not being in the interests of the country's economy. Irritating as it is and was clear that the continued growth of fossil fuel power flight clearly needs to be curved to even stabilise GHG emissions and this can only be done by increasing it's cost.

Even though I do largely agree with weighting all decisions of a capitalist government heavily on what will achieve the most economic growth (leading to prosperity) politicians have long maintained a facade of smug ignorance to the realistic cost/impact of human contributed climate change.

As usual, the people at the top are several steps behind on what's best to do: after letting ailing nuclear power stations, well, ail for decades, too afraid of the bad PR a pro nuclear stance would have, they're finally coming round to the idea of using nuclear as a power source with no atmospheric detriment: the lesser of 2 evils. This comes now that I’m convinced that the Lib Dem approach of: no fission as the only option (their only policy i used to disagree with on grounds of practicality) now make more sense to me. Typical.

The approach the enlightened German governance currently seems to be taking would be the way to go: big state investment in renewable energy technology (mainly solar - photovoltaic) to reduce manufacturing costs and make renewables outright competitive on the energy market. It wouldn't even take a supper-scale multi billion pound engineering project like a tidal damned estuary! (even though one on the seven estuary would provide 1/4 of the nations electricity!).

Sigh...

PS: Guardian Article tells of the UK recruiting Al Gore in an attempt to lobby the US to take said report seriously. No chance of anything happening before the Bush ousting of full elections in 2008.