Climate change - a dynamic business environment -

Back in the days when the internet was new, the prevailing wisdom was that it would broaden our minds by exposing us to a wider range of opinions. It seems that all that's really happened is that whatever whacky views we might have we can always find someone out there that agrees with them. Surfing the web has become more like wandering around in a reflective bubble.

It's not easy to see things from different perspective and in my own bubble I've tended to look at climate change in terms of its environmental and social impact. The general perspective being that inequality and loss of habitat are bad things. This has been accompanied by weary attempts to understand why the world of business and government doesn't quite seem able to take it seriously. Or not seriously enough to do anything that might compromise short term profits.

I was up the garden pruning fruit trees the other day when it occurred to me that, from the simple perspective of making money, climate change has quite a lot going for it. Not for everyone of course - not for farmers whose lands might become either inundated with water or desiccated by drought - but for lots of those in the general business of exploiting resources and selling stuff it does. 

For example, if I were a big fossil fuel company it would make sense to get as much out of the ground now, before governments stop us, and turn it into cash to be invested elsewhere. My own corporate strategy would be to invest the income in remediation. That way I'd effectively end up getting paid twice. Once for extracting the fuel that causes the damage and once again for putting the damage right.

Just as the mass extinction events of the past have opened up opportunities for new life forms to emerge, albeit on geological timescales, so climate change will offer new opportunities for business. A bit like a good war. Since one feature of the current neo-liberal economic order is that the proceeds of whatever growth there might be are increasingly finding their way into the hands of the hyper rich, there will be plenty of money to be made preserving their exclusive lifestyles. Why bother attending to the needs of the poorest 3.5 billion when they only control as much wealth as the richest 85. Besides, because poor people can only spend small sums at a time the transaction costs, per $ spent, are much higher. To put it simply its a lot easier to make a lot of money constructing luxury yachts, taking people on expensive adventure holidays, giving them financial advice on what to do with all the money they don't really need or drawing up the contracts to make sure they keep most of it to themselves, than it is to sell lots and lots of basic necessities to people who don't have very much.

Now you might argue that climate change will damage a lot of our existing infrastructure. The costs associated with cleaning up after major storm events in the developed world are absolutely enormous. But this money doesn't disappear, it simply ends up in the hands of those doing the rebuilding and I feel pretty certain that as long as the rich need a particular bit of infrastructure it will get rebuilt.

Just as it has become clear that for our minds to work effectively we have to be able to forget capitalism can only supply us with new goods and services if we've used up, or wasted, the ones we've already got. ( I believe that Singer sewing machines were so durable that the company ended up buying, and then destroying, second hand machines simply to take them out of competition with the new machines it was trying to sell) Where would the arms trade be without market stimulation through destruction? 

So, in the cut throat competitive world of big business, climate change simply presents us with a dynamic business environment. One that separates the men from the boys in this best of all competitive worlds. The rest of us will just have to put up with being losers.

Taking the lane

Most motor mechanics will tell you that its nearly always the near side shocks that go first. If you've ever driven along the gutter you'll now why. That's why on a bicycle its best to avoid the hazards of the gutter - the drains, the potholes and the little bits of glass - and ride further out in the road.

Keeping out of the gutter has another advantage, it puts you in line of sight of vehicles coming up from behind. This means when the driver makes a decision they're much more likely to take you into account. Even better if you manage to make eye contact because you then become a person and owed some fellow human consideration.

Scientifically there's evidence that the sense we have of ourselves has a variable physical boundary. What's known as our peripersonal space doesn't just include our physical bodies but also any tools that we might happen to be using. The axe head, the screw driver or the club becomes a temporary extension of yourself. A driver will react to a threat to his or her car as though it were made to him or herself; perhaps wincing at a near miss. And, just as we're quite good at not bumping into things as we wander about, so too are motorists. Put yourself ever so slightly in the line of fire and they're much more likely to notice that you're there and respond accordingly. Hide in the gutter and you're readily ignored.

Now keeping out of the gutter is all well and good, but what happens when the road narrows so much that you'll block the traffic? Well, there's a simple answer to that one, and its approved by the AA (A major UK motoring organisation) as well as Transport for London and other authorities, don't pull over. That's it. You've got every right to be there and if you move to the edge you'll only encourage risky overtaking.

Indeed, the advice gets stronger. Not only should you keep out of the gutter but also there are times when you should move out even further and actively prevent vehicles from attempting to overtake.  I tend to think of it as being like a slow speed Michael Schumacher (let's hope he gets well) using position on the road to control what goes on behind. 

The name of this manoeuvre is "taking the lane" and today, having found myself out and about with a tape measure, I decided to do a little case study and see whether I should or shouldn't be "taking the lane".

The case is me, on my bike being overtaken by a car rather like my own, though obviously with someone else driving, going through the second chicane on Seamer Road.  Like the picture below, but about where the car is.

Here are my results

I tend to ride with my wheels about 0.8m from the edge of the road. My handlebars have an overall width of 0.6m. The recommended minimum safe passing distance in France is 1.0m. My car has an overall width of 2.1m. The kerb to kerb width of the chicane is 3.6m.

Here's a diagram 

You'll notice that this implies that you should probably "take the lane" for any road less than 4.2m wide and even if I rode only 0.5m from the edge of the road -with my handlebars nearly overhanging the kerb - you'd still need a width of at least 3.9m for someone to safely pass. 

The chicane on Seamer Road simply doesn't give drivers enough room to pass safely and I'd advise everyone that cycles down there to get out of the gutter and take the lane.

Postscript: I've just (April 15th) come across this http://www.cyclescheme.co.uk/community/how-to/road-positioning

An unfortunate acronym

When the current UK government came to power there was a great deal of talk about fairness. Some of us might naively have believed that this meant sharing the burden of austerity so that those most able to pay might pay the most but it turned out that what they had in mind was the selfish adolescent version of fairness that simply shouts "it's not fair" at some perceived personal sleight.

So, we get poorly paid workers pitted against the even poorer unemployed and people in insecure employment against immigrants who are "coming to take their jobs". Such is the talk in the popular press of benefits scroungers and welfare dependency that, as might be expected and was probably calculated, a number of myths have grown up. For example, a good proportion of people believe that most welfare spending goes on the unemployed. In fact this is less than 7% with the biggest chunk going to pensioners and most of the rest going to people in badly paid employment (i.e badly paying employers are being subsidised by the state). They believe that 27% of claims are fraudulent whereas the true figure is 0.8%.

It's clear that what people like is a coherent story and the one about the crisis being caused by a profligate Labour Government spending all of their money on ne'er-do-wells has been told so often that it is readily believed. I'm reminded that shortly after the most recent Gulf War some 70% of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11. This was the only way to make sense of their invasion of Iraq. Let's just say that neither the US nor UK governments were keen to put this misperception right.

Now because this is something I've thought about quite a lot I find it very hard to separate people from the circumstances they find themselves in, - see an early post Dispositional or Situational - and tend to react against any form of stereotyping even if its of Tory cabinet ministers (much to the annoyance of at least one of my sons). But one day I began to see if I could give it a try and build up a sense of resentment against some other sub set of the population.

Since I was riding my bike at the time and finding the traffic somewhat annoying I suddenly hit upon a potential target for my spleen. Fat people driving cars. There they are lardy and self righteous, doing themselves and everyone around them no end of harm while at the same time looking down (albeit in an upward direction) on me as either a pauper or a freak. Meanwhile, there I am gently muttering to myself that I pay my taxes to pick up their health problems.......

That was it, by then I'd left the traffic behind and was cycling up through the woods on Oliver's Mount, any excess adrenaline was now well used up, my thoughts had turned back to the circumstances that had led to their car dependency and I began to feel sorry for the years of ill health and alienation from their own bodies that was likely to follow.

See, I'm just not very good at scum bashing, partly because I know from my jam making experience.that scum tends to rise to the top - So perhaps the 85 extremely rich people who own as much as the poorest half of the world are indeed the scum of the earth - but mainly because I really do believe that we're all in this together and there but for some accidents of history go I (with philosophical reservations given in my very first post )

You may have noticed that I've got a current obsession around the public health and physical inactivity and was plotting a way to discuss this at a meeting of public officials which I happen to attend. Earlier in this post I used the pejorative term fat to describe people carrying more weight than is good for them. This isn't a good term to use in polite company, especially when its statistically likely that a good proportion of your audience will be overweight, so an alternative  medicalised expression came to mind. Not fat people but those of Super Optimal Weight. Now its usual with such terms that they get replaced by their acronyms.....

Sex and power

In the UK we're in the midst of some very contemporary sex scandals. There's the Lib Dem Peer (member of the House of Lords) who, it's alleged, was in the habit of letting his hands do the wandering and of making suggestive comments to female party members. This was at the time when he was the Party's main election strategist and therefore one of the people that could decide whether or not someone got to be a candidate. Now, to be polite, Lord Thing is not exactly a handsome man, and a good deal older than his alleged victims, so there is every reason to suppose that the only reason he imagined that he might have any success with his crude approaches was because he was in a position of power.

Meanwhile there are three ongoing court cases involving men who were famous in the entertainment industry and, it is alleged, took advantage of the opportunities presented by their fame and fortune to assault not only young women but also, in some cases, children. 

Now the main reason that the entertainment scandals have now come to light is that after the extensive publicity given to the Jimmy Savile scandal, victims of other high profile "abusers" felt able to come forward and make their belated allegations.  The common feature in all of these cases, however, is that an awful lot of people seemed to have a pretty good idea of what was going on at the time yet chose to stay quiet. 

Now, whilst we might all be convinced that in such circumstances we'd behave differently, the evidence from psychological experiments suggests otherwise. In deciding whether or not to intervene we rely as much on our instincts for self preservation (If I report this will I be the one that loses my job, misses out on promotion, gets beaten up?) as it does on our more rational sense of justice. It also depends on whether or not we think other people know about it too. If we know that other people know then not only might we be spared the personal risk by waiting to see if someone else reports it first but, if nobody does, we also know that we're no worse than anyone else. The real scandal in the Jimmy Savile case, and in some of these others, is that its clear that senior people, those not in fear of their livelihood, also chose to keep quiet. Whether their thoughts were dominated by money or reputation I can't possibly say, but quiet they did keep.

Most of my proper working life was spent teaching in Further Education (in the main 16 - 19 year olds) and this naturally meant spending a reasonable amount of working time surrounded by attractive young women. It is with a certain amount of shame that I have to admit that, despite being one of those people that usually can't keep their opinions on other people's behaviour to themselves (would you mind explaining to me why you've dropped that fag packet when there's a bin just over there?; though I have learnt to stay beyond striking distance), I sort of knew that a couple of colleagues would not only fraternise with students on a night but would also attempt to sleep with them. My excuse, self justification, is that because I lived out of town and with small children I didn't actually have any direct evidence, just rumour and hear say. I've subsequently heard, from ex-students, that their habits were well known to the students but they still got through the system and are now "happily" retired. But, just like at the BBC, I've no doubt that the college's senior staff knew but, to avoid damaging the college's reputation and for an easy life, chose to remain quiet.

As far as I was concerned the students at the college were strictly off limits. It simply wasn't possible to have any kind of relationship, other than being friendly, that wasn't fundamentally asymmetric. Whether the student was in one of my classes or not there'd always be an asymmetry of power. I had it and they didn't.

Having spent my formative years among the more radical elements of student society, a bunch of wild haired lefties, and coming from a home where my mother did all the fixing of things and, even though she didn't say it, was clearly an instinctive feminist, I was lucky enough not to confuse sex with power. i.e sex is something that you do with someone else, but only if you both want to, and isn't something done by someone to someone else simply because they can. Sex has never been about accumulating notches on the bed post or bragging about conquests to my mates. In all this I consider myself very lucky. But it has to be admitted that for many men sex is about power and conquest. 

In A Redacted Abuse of Power I described events that led to me exposing the CEO of the company I was doing some work for as a fraud. During my last week with them I was told a number of things in confidence that no doubt helped to precipitate my final show down. Not least among these, were the reports of sexual advances made by the CEO to much younger female members of staff and their subsequent marginalisation when these advances were rejected. 

I suspect that when it comes to choosing a mate there's more to it than simple physical attraction. Men are likely to favour women who stand the best chance of having healthy children. Women are likely to favour men who look like they could keep the family fed. So if there is such a thing as straightforward physical attraction  it will be  modulated by age and wealth. There is also evidence that flirtatious behaviour is more common the first time you meet someone new than it is subsequently (In order to assess whether or not someone is a potential mate the idea has to be raised before it can be rejected). However, none of this excuses men who should know better. They may have crap relationships built on a gradient of power but there's no good reason to impose them on anyone else.

A brief defence of Descartes in the modern world

In a criminal court you’re assumed to be innocent unless its proven beyond reasonable doubt that you're not. In a civil court they decide if - on the balance of probabilities - it’s more likely that you did it than that you didn’t. 

Philosophers, beginning with Descartes, have often argued that we can only be absolutely certain of something if it’s beyond the possibility any sort of doubt whatsoever.

These days, when we’re familiar with the concept of virtual reality, it’s probably easier to see what the philosophers were getting at that it’s ever been. After all, how could I tell that I’m really sat at a desk in a library rather than lying in a laboratory somewhere having the appropriate bits of my brain stimulated in order to create the impression that I’m sat in a library. Even if I were to get up and wander off to the local café for a cup of coffee how could I really be certain that I’d gone anywhere at all. There’s only so much information that my brain and body can process at any one time so the virtual world being created around me wouldn’t have to represent the entire world only the bits that I happen to be interacting with at the time. It could even be arranged that my body, or what I fondly imagine is my body, is stimulated in such a way that I feel genuinely tired after running up a flight of virtual stairs.

So, whilst it’s possible for me to doubt the existence of the world around me, in particular the existence of other people, there does seem to be one thing that is beyond doubt. My own existence; Either as a real person in a real world or as the subject of an illusion in a virtual reality that’s being created for me.

Of course, you dear reader, assuming you exist, might object that all this speculation about making a virtual reality this good is so unlikely to be true that it’s currently well beyond reasonable doubt that its possible at all, and you’d be right. I’d never get away with "I didn't think the world in which I ambushed the old lady was real and thought that I was just playing the latest version of Grand Theft Auto" in a civil court let alone a criminal one. But this isn’t really the point. To be absolutely certain of something there must be no room for doubt whatsoever.

So where Descartes famously said “Cogito ergo sum”, (I think therefore I am) I could now just as well say "I'm the one getting fooled into thinking a virtual world is real therefore I am."

The cost of sitting around in North Yorkshire

In a recent post - If it were a drug - I looked at the yawning chasm between public policy and the increasingly well established fact that raising basic levels of physical activity can have a dramatic impact on people's health.

Since April 2013 public health has become the responsibility of local authorities and in my case this means North Yorkshire County Council. So, I've had a look at the official statistics and done a few sums.

There are about 2.9 million people with Diabetes in the UK and the total cost is estimated to be about £23.7 billion. This suggests that the cost is about £8000 per patient per year.

A recent report estimates that at present only 24% of people between 40 and 79 in North Yorkshire take the recommended minimum amount of physical exercise (5 x 30 min sessions per week of slightly raised heart rate). 

If this was doubled to 50% then there would be 1160 fewer cases of Diabetes per year. 
This translates into an annual cost saving, for reductions in diabetes alone, of £9.3 million. 

It is also estimated that there would be 149 fewer deaths, 48 fewer emergency hospital admissions for Coronary Heart Disease, 29 fewer new cases of Breast Cancer and 21 fewer new cases of Colorectal Cancer. 

There are 1.4 million men and 900,000 women with Coronary Heart Disease in the UK . The total cost is estimated to be about £29 billion. This comes out at about £12,600 per year per patient. I presume that not all of the new cases would result in emergency admissions so the saving in North Yorkshire of doubling the rate of physical activity would be at least £600,000.

The average cost of treatment per case of Breast Cancer is estimated to be £7247.This means the saving on treatment alone, i.e not absenteeism and other social costs, would be about £210,000.

Since typical treatment costs per case of Colorectal Cancer are about £20,000 the saving on treatment alone would be of the order of £420,000. 

So, not including the costs associated with depression, anxiety and dementia - which are all significantly relieved by physical activity - or the costs associated with 149 premature deaths, the overall saving produced by doubling the number of 40 -79 year olds engaging in  the minimum recommended amount of physical activity is at least £10.5 million.

Since the population is just over 600,000 this comes out at about £17.50 per year per man, woman or child.

Let us hope that the resources made available come somewhere near reflecting these potential savings.

Seamer Road

Every now and then I produce a post with an explicit political purpose. Today's is looking at provision for cycling in my home town of Scarborough. 

Over a decade ago our local borough council set up a Cycle Forum. To be frank, or is that just cynical, they did this not because they had any great plans to get the population of the town onto bikes but because they couldn't get central government funding for two park and ride car parks unless they had one. However, as far as most of the participants were concerned this was a serious business and we pored over maps, drew up plans and identified our priorities.

Amid the host of potential schemes two always rose to the top of the pile. The first of these was what is now officially known as the Cinder Track, the old Scarborough to Whitby railway line which provides a well used and safe off road route form the town centre and up through the northern suburbs. The second was Seamer Road. This is the main road in and out of the town from the South West and, it turns out, is the most heavily used by cyclists as they make their way from residential areas in the north to the outlying industrial estates on the edge of town.

During the development of the park and ride car parks and their associated bus routes our plans for Seamer Road were repeatedly put on hold until we found out what the final decision was about bus routes. In the end, the buses were routed a different way and  a long stretch of Seamer Road was simply left as it was.

As it is, few people enjoy riding down Seamer Road even though there's no sensible alternative. The main reasons for this are the proximity of heavy traffic, the stretches that have been chicaned to separate oncoming traffic, but which leave too little room for a vehicle to pass safely, and the increasingly bad state of the road surface.

Leaving the town centre the first chicane was built to separate the traffic leaving the town from that coming in and wanting to turn right down Valley Road. The road width is so narrow at this point that cyclists have little alternative but to actively block vehicles coming up from behind; since it isn't safe to allow them to squeeze past. This takes a degree of assertiveness that those who aren't experienced simply don't have even though this strategy is explicitly endorsed by the biggest motoring association in the UK the AA.

Junction of Seamer Road with Valley Road

For about 10m there simply isn't enough room for vehicles to pass

Shortly past this point, just when there's the greatest possibility of direct conflict with traffic, the surface becomes really bumpy and there's always the feeling that you might get thrown into the path of passing traffic.

Unavoidable potholes and bumps

The poor surface continues as the road descends the gentle slope down the hill towards the old football stadium with the biggest bumps just where you'd want to ride.

This van is about to encounter one of the unavoidable bumps

Beyond the junction with St Margaret's Road the footway has been designated as dual use but just before you get there there's a long chicane protecting traffic wanting to turn right into a retail park. 

Chicane seen from the north

Looking back from the south

Even for experienced cyclists it's hard to maintain a safe line down this long 30/40m stretch without getting severely harassed from behind.

Seamer Road has been dug up a couple of times in the last few years to replace the elderly gas main that runs beneath and it wasn't reasonable to expect major surface improvements until this work had been completed. Now the work's been done, I don't think its unreasonable to expect that not only might this be done soon, but that the opportunity should also be taken to directly address the needs of cyclists along this busy transport corridor. For most of the road this could be as little as using paint to clearly mark out an on road bike lane so that at least we can get past the traffic when its stationary.

In the near future there is likely to be increased local demand on the road. Firstly because of likely residential development at the old football stadium and completion of development at Oliver's Heights and secondly from the proposed Sports Village which lies just the other side of the railway and is connected to Seamer Road by a pedestrian and cycle underpass.

Railway underpass to Sports Village site

I suspect that if a few more of our decision makers actually cycled the route themselves then something would have been done by now. As it is, it is to be hoped that an appeal to their intellect, as opposed to direct experience, will have to be enough.

Meanwhile, I shall continue to encourage fellow cyclists to get out of the gutter and assert their right to road space. Though it seems that despite the advice of the AA, Transport for London and other safety conscious bodies there is still resistance from some motorists to cyclists taking the lane.

Update . A later post looks at whether or not you should "take the lane" at the second chicane.

Two wheels good

For about the last twenty years I've been gently campaigning to get better facilities for cycling in my home town. Unlike many other parts of Europe only a very small proportion of journeys in the UK are made by bike (of the order of 1%) and, in common with the USA and Australia, cycling is primarily regarded as a recreational activity. Of course there are a few places, like Oxford, Cambridge, York and, increasingly, inner London, where the rates are much higher than this but, in the nature of averages, this just means that things are even worse elsewhere.

Now whilst I've obviously got a lot of opinions about why this should be the case, and get caught up in the odd flurry of research to see if these opinions have any basis in reality,  the key factors can be broadly characterised as personal, social and geographic; though with considerable overlap between the three.

The geographic bit, analysed in detail in lots of American and other studies on auto dependency, relates to the physical structure of our towns and cities. To put it simply, unless housing, places of work and amenities are close enough together there's little chance of getting people out of their cars and onto bicycles. The key metric appears to be an activity density of 35 people (either living or working) per hectare. Less than this and the amount of time spent travelling by car, and the amount of energy use by cars, starts to exponentially increase. 

The social bit, which appears to be the key determining factor in the UK, is how you think other people will think of you if they see you riding a bicycle. Studies of social attitudes in the UK suggest that most people think they'll be seen as poor, unfeasibly athletic or just plain eccentric.

The personal bit links to the simple fact that a good proportion of the adult population is generally unfit and the prospect of getting on a bicycle and making a commitment to pedal it for half an hour is just too much to contemplate. Once upon a time I used to take students out for bike rides on a Wednesday afternoon. We wouldn't go far, about 15 - 20km, but there would inevitably be a few hills. Early in the season there were always one or two students who were surprised to find themselves breathing more heavily going up a hill and had to be reassured that this was a natural response to increased oxygen demand. In short, even as 16 - 19 year olds they were already alienated for their own bodies.

Later today i'll probably set off to the supermarket on my bike, with panniers to carry the load, and if I turn to look out of the window I can see the white roof of the supermarket less than 1km away. However, rather than just go straight there its likely that I'll extend the journey to about 10km and take in the top of Oliver's Mount. 

Oliver's Mount from Scarborough town centre

(from a web site devoted to pictures of transmission towers)

So whilst going to the shops is definitely a utility trip, and therefore slightly unusual in the UK, for most of the time I'll be disguised as someone doing it for recreation.  So not poor, just eccentric.

Looking back through trees on the way to the summit