Government failure, information failure, environmental failure:

Most wood energy schemes are a 'disaster' for climate change

By Matt McGrath Environment correspondent

• 23 February 2017

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-39053678

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Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption There has been rapid growth in the use of wood chips and pellets for generating electricity

Using wood pellets to generate low-carbon electricity is a flawed policy that is speeding up not slowing down climate warming.

That's according to a new study which says wood is not carbon neutral and emissions from pellets are higher than coal.

Subsidies for biomass should be immediately reviewed, the author says.

Energy from trees has become a critical part of the renewable supply in many countries including the UK.

Critical role

While much of the discussion has focussed on wind and solar power, across Europe the biggest source of green energy is biomass.

It supplies around 65% of renewable power - usually electricity generated from burning wood pellets.
EU Governments, under pressure to meet tough carbon cutting targets, have been encouraging electricity producers to use more of this form of energy by providing substantial subsidies for biomass burning.

However this new assessment from Chatham House suggests that this policy is deeply flawed when it comes to cutting CO2.

According to the author, current regulations do not count the emissions from the burning of wood at all, assuming that they are balanced by the planting of new trees.

Image copyright Getty Images

Image caption Wood chips and pellets are often burned used alongside coal in power plants

Duncan Brack, the independent environmental policy analyst who wrote the report, says this idea is not credible.

"It doesn't make sense," said Mr Brack, who is also a former special adviser at the UK Department of Energy and Climate Change.

"The fact that forests have grown over the previous 20 or 100 years means they are storing large amounts of carbon, you can't pretend it doesn't make an impact on the atmosphere if you cut them down and burn them."

"You could fix them in wood products or in furniture or you could burn them, but the impact on the climate is very different."

Mr Brack says the assumption of carbon neutrality misses out on some crucial issues, including the fact that young trees planted as replacements absorb and store less carbon than the ones that have been burned.

Another major problem is that under UN climate rules, emissions from trees are only counted when they are harvested.

However the US, Canada and Russia do not use this method of accounting so if wood pellets are imported from these countries into the EU, which doesn't count emissions from burning, the carbon simply goes "missing".

Burning wood pellets can release more carbon than fossil fuels like coal per unit of energy, over their full life cycle, the author argues.

Often the products have to travel long distances increasing the emissions associated with their production and transport.

Image copyright Southern Environmental Law Center

Image caption The map shows the concentration of wood pellet plants in the south eastern US exporting to Europe

Within the EU, the UK is the biggest importer of wood pellets for heat and power, with some 7.5m tonnes shipped from the US and Canada in 2015-16. Most of these imports comes from the southeast US, where there are growing concerns about the trade.

"This report confirms once again that cutting down trees and burning them as wood pellets in power plants is a disaster for climate policy, not a solution," said David Carr, General Counsel of the Southern Environmental Law Centre in the US.

"Forests in our region, the southeast US, are being clear cut to provide wood pellets for UK power plants. The process takes the carbon stored in the forest and puts it directly into the atmosphere via the smokestack at a time when carbon pollution reductions are sorely needed."

Within Europe the push for pellets is also providing incentives for the forest industry to plant more and harvest more trees. Environmentalists are worried that the system is creating a cycle that can't keep up with itself.

"If you keep increasing your harvest over a period of time you will never be able to recoup your emissions from burning that growth, you will never catch up with yourself," said Linde Zuidema from Fern.

"They are shooting themselves in the foot, they are not taking into account that increased harvesting of trees will actually have an impact on the role that forests play as a carbon sink."

The new study also highlights concerns over the use of BECCS - bio-energy with carbon capture and storage.

Scientists, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have suggested that this system could be used to suck carbon from the atmosphere to keep the world from dangerous levels of warming.

"It's really worrying," said Duncan Brack. "The number of scenarios that the IPCC reviewed that rely on BECCS for ambitious climate change targets, it's crazy, I'm not the only person who's said that."

Concern is growing about the continued use of wooden pellets and chips for electric power. The EU has proposed a new system for biomass under its revised Renewable Energy Directive.

Duncan Brack says it's a good opportunity to review the current methods of giving subsidies for the use of wood energy across Europe. The use of saw mill waste should be encouraged - but the burning of pellets should be curtailed.

"The simplest way is to limit support to those type of biomass that really represent genuine carbon savings, primarily sawmill waste and post-consumer wood waste," said Duncan Brack. "I would rather see support for forest industry, not forest energy."

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Something important to chew on - for the exam and your future!

There is really good material here for supply-side, building on apprenticeships etc., but please absorb it for your own benefit as well:

23 February 2017

A smart answer to our productivity problem

By Patrick Spencer

More apprenticeships will improve productivity. Photo: Christopher Furlong / Getty Images

More apprenticeships will improve productivity. Photo: Christopher Furlong / Getty Images

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• Businesses are increasingly opting for apprentices not graduates
• The Budget is a perfect opportunity to support vocational education
• The highly skilled will be in more demand than the highly qualified

The UK has a productivity problem. And the pursuit of productivity matters for the poorest. It is often considered a high-level topic, but tackling it properly will make the biggest difference to those from the most disadvantaged communities.

Prior to the financial crash of 2008, the UK consistently recorded productivity growth rates above international comparisons. This is not the case anymore. In 2015, the UK’s productivity lagged 11 per cent behind Germany, 12 per cent behind France, and 39 per cent behind the United States of America. Between 1991 and 2007, the UK averaged productivity growth rates of 2.38 per cent. Between 2008 and 2014, that figure is just 0.05 per cent.

It is proving particularly punishing for those at the bottom of the income distribution – households between the 5th and 25th income percentile have seen almost no wage growth in 20 years. While income inequality has fallen, this has largely been due to the tax and welfare system propping up wages in the bottom quarter of households.

Attacking the productivity decline nationally demands a range of policies that support capital investment, employment, trade and innovation. However, tackling the problem of low productivity growth among the bottom 25 per cent requires more targeted intervention as well.

The good news for the Government is that there is an increasingly large body of evidence that links investment in education and skills with long term increases in productivity growth at both an individual and regional level.

A Confederation of British Industry report on regional productivity has found that Trafford has above average GCSE scores compared with the wider North West and is also six per cent more productive. Conversely, only half the students in Blackpool managed the regional average at GCSE level, and the area’s productivity is 75 per cent of the regional average.

The same is true not just of academic attainment but the wider skills picture. A 2015 review from the National institute of Economic and Social Research concluded that “as the UK’s workforce becomes better qualified, the improvement in workforce skills emerges as one of the main factors currently boosting productivity in the UK”.

A joint Education and Business select committee report in 2015 came to the similar conclusion that “intermediate-level skills … make key contributions to absorptive capacity at firm level. Even if high-skilled employees such as professional engineers and scientists contribute disproportionately to firms’ ability to identify and acquire useful external knowledge, the successful application of this knowledge will depend in many ways on intermediate-skilled employees as well as on high-skilled employees”.

The bad news is that the UK has underperformed in both academic and vocational education for some time. Last year (2015/16) only 59 per cent of students achieved the benchmark A*-C grade in GCSE English and Maths, meaning 41 per cent of students will leave school without the key qualifications for getting a job. Regarding vocational skills, in 2012, 22 per cent of the UK workforce had a qualification at levels 2 or 3 compared to 35 per cent of the French workforce, and 55 per cent of the German workforce.

For a future workforce, this skills deficit matters. The Government’s Working Futures report predicts that in the future “more people with higher qualifications will be unemployed and higher qualified people will make up a much larger portion of the unemployed population”. All evidence, anecdotal, empirical and international, seems to point towards a future where intermediate technical skills in new age technology will be in high demand.

Among charities we speak to, working with school leavers and those without jobs, we repeatedly hear of the importance not of another GCSE or A Level, but the life skills and technical skills that will serve them in employment.

In the near term, the Government should continue to support the roll-out of high quality apprenticeships. Apprenticeships offer students and mid-career professionals the chance to learn in a working environment, something businesses increasingly prefer.

JJ Churchill Ltd, a family-run manufacturing business in the East Midlands hasn’t hired an entry level university graduate in over 14 years, choosing apprentices instead. Accountancy firm PWC have quadrupled their school leaver intake to well over 160 places by 2015.

But for the longer term the Government must also embrace the positive returns of vocational education to earnings and lower rates of welfare dependency by investing in the skills agenda before children leave school. There are plenty of real world examples of social organisations doing this already: working with young adults, at risk of falling into a cycle of low income and job insecurity, to build valuable skills.

For example, Young Enterprise have worked over with 3.8 million students across the country at all levels of the education system, helping them establish skills in small business management, financial literacy and how to get through a job interview.

By supporting better vocational education and high-quality apprenticeships for school leavers, the UK can help build a labour force with the skills base for the future. The Prime Minister’s industrial strategy consultation and the upcoming Budget statement will be great opportunities for this Government to support both vocational education and apprenticeships, and in the process, reaffirm their commitment to boosting both productivity at a national level and helping those communities that need a productivity boost the most.

Patrick Spencer is a researcher at the Centre for Social Justice

Need some evidence for govt holding back growth? Try this:

Take snippets from this to use as evidence to back up evaluation points - e.g. how well-intentioned intervention can reduce growth, thus leaving the workers it was the intention to help worse off.

23 February 2017

Why South Africa is no longer such a gold mine

By Marian L. Tupy @humanprogress

The Venetia mine, South Africa. Photo: Mujahid Safodien / AFP / Getty Images

The Venetia mine, South Africa. Photo: Mujahid Safodien / AFP / Getty Images

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• Is government deliberately obstructing South Africa's mines?
• The mining industry must stand up to the ANC
• South Africa's $2.5 trillion mineral wealth may never be exploited

South Africa started as an unassuming way-station for Dutch ships sailing to the Dutch East Indies, but it rose to prominence thanks to its immensely rich mineral deposits.

Beneath the country’s sweeping landscape lies 80 per cent of the world’s platinum, 48 per cent of its palladium, 17 per cent of its manganese and 17 per cent of its gold. The coal and iron deposits are said to be among the best in the world, along with a wealth of tin, chromium, titanium and vanadium.

Citigroup has valued South Africa’s mineral resources at $2.5 trillion – more valuable than Russia’s, Australia’s, and Canada’s. It is questionable, however, whether that wealth will ever be exploited.

My first column for Cato Institute, in 2002 was titled Well-Intended South African Mining Charter Is Recipe for Disaster. It dealt with a recently agreed charter of understanding between the African National Congress government and the mining industry. The measure’s stated goal was to “empower the previously disadvantaged” groups through racial quotas in both employment and the ownership of mining companies’ stock.

In my column, I argued that the charter wouldn’t work. Instead of helping the poor, it would drive down profit margins and the mining companies would be forced to cut their costs by hiring fewer employees.

South Africa’s inflexible labour laws, I argued, would further exacerbate the concerns of potential investors, as would the recent nationalisation of South Africa’s mineral rights. Both these factors would make long-term returns on investment more uncertain.

I concluded that the expansion of South Africa’s mining giants into Canada, Latin America and Australia, needed to be seen in the light of that increasing uncertainty. Though they were far too cowardly to admit to it publicly, the mining companies were hedging their bets.

In January 2003, the South African Chamber of Mines took out an advertisement in the Southern African edition of the Time Magazine. The advertisement quoted heavily from my article, attacking both me and my conclusions.

Dr Iraj Abedian, a director and chief economist of the Standard Bank Group of SA, described the charter as “a significant step toward normalizing the socio-economic environment – dealing boldly with South Africa’s skewed distribution of wealth and income… it will be a giant step towards reduction of investment risk in South Africa.”

Roger Baxter, chief economist of SA Chamber of Mines, noted that as a result of the charter, “mining companies …[could] operate in a framework of certainty” and anyone thinking otherwise “has not done his homework”.

I still cherish those comments. Then, last week, I came across a new report from the South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), the country’s oldest think-tank, entitled Mining in SA: Then, now, and into the future. It made for a depressing reading.

According to John Kane-Berman, the much-respected scholar who wrote the report, “the South African mining industry shrunk between 2001 and 2008 by 1 per cent a year, whereas the top 20 mining exporting countries averaged growth of 5 per cent a year. The mining industry … was smaller now than in 1994. Roger Baxter [yes, the same Roger Baxter who accused me of not doing my homework] of the Chamber said the industry’s real GDP had shrunk by 2.9 per cent between that year and 2015… [This decline] coincided with one of the greatest bull runs in commodities, starting in 2002 and ending in 2012, that the world had ever seen.”

While I do not have data to calculate the drop in the mining sector employment between the signing of the charter and the present day, Berman notes that the number of jobs in mining decreased by almost 30 per cent between 1990 and 2015. Revealingly, the ANC government is aware of the job losses that occurred on its inept watch.

As Jessie Duarte, deputy secretary general of the ANC, said in 2014, “Lost employment in the mining industry, considering the low skills base of labour it employs, translates into a further burden on the country’s social wage. It adds to the depression in the labour-sending areas that are already destitute.”

Given its wealth of resources, surely South Africa should  benefit from future commodity price increases. But it might not, according to the SAIRR report. “Very few of the mineral rights awarded in recent years to junior mining companies were being utilised by their recipients. There was next to no exploration happening. There was also a risk that most of the assets would remain in the ground because there was no funding, investors having been kept away by government policies, regulatory uncertainty, and a hostile labour regime.”

Since the ANC came to power in 1994, the private sector has brown-nosed the government. Instead of cooperation, however, it has earned the ANC’s contempt. And each time the private sector gave in to the government’s demands, those insatiable predators who govern South Africa came back for more.

Today, Berman writes, “The mining industry is at a crossroads. It has spent considerable sums on social and labour plans and also on empowerment, but this has not satisfied the government. There are even suspicions in the industry that some of the government’s demands are designed to make life so difficult for mining companies that they will sell out to chosen political favourites.

“One former executive of a major company told the writer of this paper [i.e., Berman] that he and some of his colleagues believed from the early days of the Mining Charter that they should take a tougher stance towards government demands. However, he said, theirs was a minority view. Now, however, some mining executives believe the time for appeasement is over.”

I sure hope so, but fear that it might be far too late.

Marian L. Tupy is the editor of HumanProgress.org

Innovation in the trucking industry - fuels:

Interesting analysis of different fuel options being explored in the bid to find cleaner engines. Think about the impact on the crude oil sector:

Yesterday we explained how there’s a coming contest in the crucial world of lorries.

On the one hand is Tesla, with its disruptive-but-familiar batteries. On the other is Nikola Motor, a smaller firm, which sees a future in hydrogen.

Today, we’re going to be trying to tease out a winner. It’s fair to say that it’s a tough call. History shows Elon Musk is a fairly dangerous guy to disagree with – because he’s got a long track record of being right about things. But in this particular instance, I can see a range of problems with his argument.

It’s fair to point out that current hydrogen production is barking mad. It may be zero emissions at the tailpipe, but the pollution still comes out somewhere. So, over the next five or ten years, I’d say that Musk is probably backing the right horse. At the very least, there’s a significant role for battery-powered trucks. That’s certainly true for the less demanding applications – shorter haul distances and lighter loads.

But, what about the longer term – and the trickier loads and runs?

Dare I say it, I think Musk may have made a bad call. I can’t see the impracticalities of batteries being easily overcome. Nobody wants to sit around, waiting for their rig to charge. If you’re on a trans-European run, that’s a real issue. Furthermore, the weight of batteries eats into the payload – requiring more trips, trucks and drivers. These issues will certainly delay wholesale rollout of electric trucks. They might not leave the door open for hydrogen, though. We could all stick to diesel for those trickier tasks – at least for the near term (notwithstanding the pressure on diesel’s role in air pollution).

There is, of course, a fairly obvious fix. Tesla may design trucks with swappable batteries. The presence of palletised facilities at many depots makes this an easy win. Just fork-lift out a dead battery and drop in a new one. Simples!

Another approach is to have on-road charging. This could use overhead wires, like trams (Siemens); or charging plates in the roadway (Highways England is testing these). They’re both possible, but they require expensive infrastructure. Slow battery charging means miles of roads to be upgraded. Accordingly, this is unlikely to happen without large-scale state support.

Even if electricity can be made to work practically, there’s still a catch. In the long run, this glitch might pose serious problems for Musk’s logic. As we move to a renewables-dominated economy, we’ll need to store energy for the winter. It’s difficult to imagine how we’ll do this without hydrogen. Sure, you can then turn hydrogen into a range of fuels (formic acid, DME, methane) – but you can’t escape the first step. Even if we don’t store energy for months as hydrogen, we have little choice but to make it in the first place. And, if you’ve got a hydrogen factory, then a bunch of passing truckers makes a pretty handy market. No need to build an expensive chemical plant on top.

So, I’m calling a draw on this one. Tesla, I suspect, may win in the short term. Nikola potentially has a better long-term vision, but whether it’ll be around long enough to fulfil it is an entirely different matter. Nikola may have significant long-run advantages over diesel (lower fuel costs, lower pollution), but this won’t translate into widespread adoption, without a decent fuelling network.

A complication for the above argument is that Tesla’s technology may be radically improved over time. One approach that I’m holding out for is ultracapacitors – the dark horse of energy storage. We’ll shortly be covering these in depth in Exponential Investor. In short, capacitors tend to have pretty rubbish capacity, but charge lightning-fast. If trucks could charge in a few seconds, then it might make the whole hydrogen hassle much less attractive. What’s more, the capacity constraints of capacitors may be solved in coming years. If that happens, we’d probably still need hydrogen in the economy, but there would be no need to put it anywhere near a truck.

But what of the incumbents?

Volvo is trying to push a fuel called dimethyl ether (DME). It’s not alone, and the fuel even has a trade association to fight its corner. DME is basically two molecules of methane, stuck together with an oxygen atom. On the plus side: it’s cleaner-burning than diesel; and better behaved than hydrogen in transport and storage. In fact, it’s not unlike liquefied petroleum gas (LPG). However, it currently relies on fossils for its manufacture. Ultimately, it could be made from renewably-produced hydrogen – but that’s comparably-costly to other power-to-fuels technology. I still remain to be convinced that it’s desirable to take one viable fuel (ie, hydrogen), and then make it into a variety of others. If you’re looking for a comparator, there’s some early work from the Delft University of Technology at using formic acid. This could be a simpler process, but it’s hard to tell where the challenges may lie.

Walmart is showing another vision of the future, with its 2014 WAVE concept truck. This is a battery-electric hybrid, with a gas turbine from Capstone to provide primary power. That’s a neat setup, as the response of the electric motor gets around one of the key problems with gas turbines: lag. Decades ago, manufacturers (eg, Rover) experimented with jet engines in cars. But the laggy throttle made them impractical. Beyond this, there were a host of other problems, such as a risk of debris intake. However, the WAVE turbine isn’t fuel-fussy, and it can use diesel or natural gas (you can even use tequila in a gas turbine car). Natural gas is a clean(ish) burning fuel – one that is already used in conventional engines, such as dustcarts. Further, “natural” gas can be synthesised from hydrogen – giving a route to low-cost sustainability, using existing distribution infrastructure. However, attempts to move turbine technology into land vehicles have been made many times, over recent decades. Whether in trains or cars, none has proved to be a winning combination. I can’t see much changing now.

So, in conclusion, I’d have to say that I’d expect Tesla’s tech to win this battle – at least in the short to medium term. Whether it’s actually Tesla that leads in electric trucks, I’m not sure. But the firm’s track record of early success makes that very likely.

In the longer term, however, it’s a different story. If ultracapacitors don’t arrive, then chemically-fuelled trucks will be here for a long time – and they won’t run on diesel forever. Nikola is making a reasonable play with hydrogen, but I think that the field is pretty wide open at present. Hydrogen is a good bet, in theory. However, current infrastructure is much more suited to fuels like natural gas or DME/formic acid. Picking winners here is hard. If you want a safe bet, back the growth of electric trucks. They won’t easily take the whole market, but they’ll find a role readily.

Alcohol & tax reform - 2 topics in one:

IEA calls for 9p flat rate of tax on alcohol to fix illogical system - see full page here, below is a summary

·      Excessive drinking creates costs to public services which the government can recoup through alcohol taxes, thereby making drinkers internalise the costs.

·      However, in Britain, the alcohol duty regime is excessive and illogical. Not only do revenues from alcohol duty far exceed the costs to public services, but units of alcohol are taxed at dramatically different rates depending on what type of drink they are in. The tax on a unit of alcohol ranges from 7p to 34p.

·      A flat rate of 9p on every unit of alcohol sold would raise approximately £4.6 billion (at current rates of consumption), totally off-setting the external costs of drinking to public services. Alcohol would continue to earn the government additional revenue in the form of VAT on the product, VAT on the duty, and other taxation on the alcohol and hospitality industry.

·      A 9p/unit tax would pay for all the costs incurred to public services by alcohol abuse and would incentivise the development of lower strength drinks across the board. It would also effectively create a minimum unit price of 11p (including VAT on the duty). Alcohol duty evasion, currently valued at £1.8 billion per annum, would likely fall as a result of the lower price of beer, wine and spirits.

·      A 9p/unit tax would ensure that alcohol duty is a tax on alcohol, not an arbitrary tax on fluids. EU regulation currently prohibits this system of alcohol taxation. Outside of the EU, Britain will no longer be constrained.

More on China's development strategy

Exporting the Chinese Model

As 2016 begins, an historic contest is underway, largely hidden from public view, over competing Chinese and Western strategies to promote economic growth. The outcome of this struggle will determine the fate of much of Eurasia in the decades to come.

JAN 12, 2016 45

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Skyscraper in Shanghai/Pixabay

STANFORD – As 2016 begins, an historic contest is underway over competing development models – that is, strategies to promote economic growth – between China, on the one hand, and the US and other Western countries on the other. Although this contest has been largely hidden from public view, the outcome will determine the fate of much of Eurasia for decades to come.

Most Westerners are aware that growth has slowed substantially in China, from over 10% per year in recent decades to below 7% today (and possibly lower). The country’s leaders have not been sitting still in response, seeking to accelerate the shift from an export-oriented, environmentally damaging growth model based on heavy manufacturing to one based on domestic consumption and services.

But there is a large external dimension to China’s plans as well. In 2013, President Xi Jinping announced a massive initiative called “One Belt, One Road,” which would transform the economic core of Eurasia. The One Belt component consists of rail links from western China through Central Asia and thence to Europe, the Middle East, and South Asia. The strangely named One Road component consists of ports and facilities to increase seaborne traffic from East Asia and connect these countries to the One Belt, giving them a way to move their goods overland, rather than across two oceans, as they currently do.

The China-led Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), which the US earlier this year refused to join, is designed, in part, to finance One Belt, One Road. But the project’s investment requirements will dwarf the resources of the proposed new institution.

Indeed, One Belt, One Road represents a striking departure in Chinese policy. For the first time, China is seeking to export its development model to other countries. Chinese companies, of course, have been hugely active throughout Latin America and Sub-Saharan Africa in the past decade, investing in commodities and extractive industries and the infrastructure needed to move them to China. But One Belt, One Road is different: its purpose is to develop industrial capacity and consumer demand in countries outside of China. Rather than extracting raw materials, China is seeking to shift its heavy industry to less developed countries, making them richer and encouraging demand for Chinese products.

China’s development model is different from the one currently fashionable in the West. It is based on massive state-led investments in infrastructure – roads, ports, electricity, railways, and airports – that facilitate industrial development. American economists abjure this build-it-and-they-will-come path, owing to concerns about corruption and self-dealing when the state is so heavily involved. In recent years, by contrast, US and European development strategy has focused on large investments in public health, women’s empowerment, support for global civil society, and anti-corruption measures.

Laudable as these Western goals are, no country has ever gotten rich by investing in them alone. Public health is an important background condition for sustained growth; but if a clinic lacks reliable electricity and clean water, or there are no good roads leading to it, it won’t do much good. China’s infrastructure-based strategy has worked remarkably well in China itself, and was an important component of the strategies pursued by other East Asian countries, from Japan to South Korea to Singapore.

The big question for the future of global politics is straightforward: Whose model will prevail? If One Belt, One Road meets Chinese planners’ expectations, the whole of Eurasia, from Indonesia to Poland will be transformed in the coming generation. China’s model will blossom outside of China, raising incomes and thus demand for Chinese products to replace stagnating markets in other parts of the world. Polluting industries, too, will be offloaded to other parts of the world. Rather than being at the periphery of the global economy, Central Asia will be at its core. And China’s form of authoritarian government will gain immense prestige, implying a large negative effect on democracy worldwide.

But there are important reasons to question whether One Belt, One Road will succeed. Infrastructure-led growth has worked well in China up to now because the Chinese government could control the political environment. This will not be the case abroad, where instability, conflict, and corruption will interfere with Chinese plans.

Indeed, China has already found itself confronting angry stakeholders, nationalistic legislators, and fickle friends in places like Ecuador and Venezuela, where it already has massive investments. China has dealt with restive Muslims in its own Xinjiang province largely through denial and repression; similar tactics won’t work in Pakistan or Kazakhstan.

This does not mean, however, that the US and other Western governments should sit by complacently and wait for China to fail. The strategy of massive infrastructure development may have reached a limit inside China, and it may not work in foreign countries, but it is still critical to global growth.

The US used to build massive dams and road networks back in the 1950s and 1960s, until such projects fell out of fashion. Today, the US has relatively little to offer developing countries in this regard. President Barack Obama’s Power Africa initiative is a good one, but it has been slow to get off the ground; efforts to build the Fort Liberté port in Haiti have been a fiasco.

The US should have become a founding member of the AIIB; it could yet join and move China toward greater compliance with international environmental, safety, and labor standards. At the same time, the US and other Western countries need to ask themselves why infrastructure has become so difficult to build, not just in developing countries but at home as well. Unless we do, we risk ceding the future of Eurasia and other important parts of the world to China and its development model.

Infrastructure (HS2) - all it's cracked up to be?

Another nice piece for evaluation. In an essay build the case for fiscal expansion, use HS2 as an example, then pull your case apart with material from this:

HS2 is monumentally wasteful, outdated, and will do nothing for the North – it must be scrapped

• SIMON HEFFER

12 FEBRUARY 2017 • 7:56AM

The North does need rail investment, but it does not need HS2 CREDIT: DAN TUCKER/ALAMY

The Institute for Fiscal Studies recently told us that we face the highest taxation for 30 years to pay down our budget deficit. We still live beyond our means, and the state continues to provide services and perform functions that should be the responsibility of individuals and the private sector. And it still wastes money, such as the misdirected overseas aid budget, whose proposed reincarnation as a means of attracting trade is deeply unconvincing. Worse still, the state proposes to waste even more money on a ministerial vanity project whose uselessness has been extensively exposed: HS2, the high-speed rail project that Parliament will shortly be asked to approve.

The Government disputes the cost of this ridiculous scheme – supposedly £73 billion for HS2 and its northern extension – but some MPs think it will easily top £100 billion. The latest increase is caused by the need to dig much more tunnel. What was originally going to be 12 miles underground will be 31 miles, mainly to protect areas of outstanding natural beauty in the Chilterns: that puts (at least) £3 billion extra on the cost. 

However, it gets worse. The technology of HS2 is already obsolete: a 500mph Hyperloop train will cut the 90-mile journey from Dubai to Abu Dhabi from over an hour to 12 minutes, but doesn’t appear to be on HS2’s radar. And HSUK, a rival proposal that claims to cause less damage to the environment and to save £20 billion by running high-speed lines alongside motorways, argues that HS2 will not connect many of the most populated areas, and improve only about 18 per cent of journey times between them; indeed, 19 per cent would be slower and the rest about the same. And the cut in journey times for the faster ones is only around 8 per cent.

A Hyperloop test: HS2 may well be obsolete by the time it opens CREDIT: AP

It was also reported last week that HS2 Ltd had awarded a £170 million contract (funded by the taxpayer) to CH2M, an American “partner” that happens to be the previous employer of HS2’s chief executive, Mark Thurston. His predecessor as interim chief executive, Roy Hill, who drew up the shortlist for the £170 million contract, had also worked for CH2M. One would hope conflict of interest checks had been made, but this sounds somewhat irregular, and requires parliamentary scrutiny.

If the marginally shorter journey times of HS2 encourage anything, it won’t be businesses from London flocking to the provinces: it will be businesses from the provinces flocking to London

The case for HS2 was exploded some time ago, when a survey about how it would increase the productivity of business passengers ignored the blindingly obvious point that people work on laptops and other devices on trains. The separateness of HS2 from the rest of the rail network means it would have lousy connectivity, which would wipe out the chance of shorter journeys. No one doubts extra capacity is needed – there are more trips per year by rail now than at any time for over a century – but HS2 is an idiotic and irrelevant way to go about it, not least because its planned route avoids so many population centres.

Mrs May has been very effective at dumping third-rate policies and third-rate people from the Cameron years, and should do the same with HS2. 

If the marginally shorter journey times of HS2 encourage anything, it won’t be businesses from London flocking to the provinces: it will be businesses from the provinces flocking to London, not least because of the poor infrastructure linking many provincial cities. The HSUK plan, drawn up by rail experts, claims to increase capacity between major cities outside London, improving inter-city as well as local services. Those claims should be tested before Parliament proceeds with HS2.

HS2 seems more likely to suck people into London, not push them to the North

The Government is slow to match its transport policy with its housing policy. To take the heat off the South East, it must encourage the building of homes in the Midlands and the North: but people and businesses would not move there without the promise of better roads and railways. Campaign groups exist around the country to reopen some lines myopically closed more than half a century ago after the Beeching report – notably those between Oxford and Cambridge and Carlisle and Edinburgh – and there should be active encouragement for such schemes to proceed.

A better, faster rail network in the English regions would not just encourage people to live and work in them: it would take some pressure off our overloaded roads

A better, faster rail network in the English regions would not just encourage people to live and work in them: it would take some pressure off our overloaded roads, whose often nightmare qualities have been instrumental in driving so many people back to the railways. A higher-capacity rail system could allow more freight to be moved by rail rather than road, with factories opening adjacent to the railways with their own goods yards. For decades this country has cried out for an integrated transport policy, and the abandonment of HS2 and the investment instead in a realistic, more efficient alternative might be the opportunity to get one.

The last prime minister, who was incapable of being wrong, refused to ditch HS2 to save face: and because on it partly rested the political career of his unlamented sidekick, George Osborne. Well, Mr Cameron is history, and Mr Osborne is on course to become a footnote in it. In the battle to make this country work effectively, everything must be up for grabs, particularly politicians’ vanity projects. There are cheaper, more efficient and less damaging ways to improve and expand Britain’s rail network than HS2. The Government should put it on hold, and examine other options without delay.