The thoughts of chairman Bernie
Bernie Masters is a geologist/zoologist who spent 8 years as a member of the Western Australian Parliament. Married to Carolina since 1976 and living in south west WA, Bernie is involved in many community groups. This blog offers insights into politics, the environment and other issues that annoy or interest him. For something completely different, visit www.fiatechnology.com.au for information about vegetated floating islands - the natural way to improve water quality.
Thursday, July 22, 2021
The Net-Zero Debate Turns Orwellian
Saturday, December 05, 2020
We can only meet our green targets by doing the exact opposite of what's in XR's manifesto
The messages in the article below apply equally to Australia and the USA.
We can only meet our green targets by doing the exact opposite of what's in XR's manifesto
The 'solutions' offered by hardcore environmentalists would not only destroy our economy, they would do very little to tackle climate change
It’s easy to baulk at the Government’s steep new emissions target – to cut CO2 emissions by as much as 69 per cent of what they were in 1990 by the end of 2030. Yet despite its ambition, this goal is not impossible. With the right technological progress, policy decisions, and economic growth it can (just about) be reached.
Frankly, there is one narrow path to achieving it. The Prime Minister must look closely at what Extinction Rebellion protesters are demanding and do exactly the opposite. From Maduro-style democracy-swerving alternative parliaments to the anti-nuclear, anti- shale gas, anti-capitalism agenda – it has long been clear that the so-called solutions being proffered by scruffy environmentalists would not only destroy what is left of our economy, they would be ineffective at tackling climate change too.
History tells us that listening to hardcore environmentalist attempts to solve the emission reduction puzzle is damaging and often counterproductive. The Green Party’s influence in Germany led to the shutting down of all that country’s nuclear power plants, and therefore a worse rate of CO2 reduction than even the United States last decade.
From nuclear power to the shale gas revolution and most importantly capitalism-led innovation, the very things Extinction Rebellion opposes provide the only route by which we can so drastically cut our emissions. The key reason why the United States of America was able to somewhat impressively reduce its CO2 emissions was the shale gas revolution under President Obama. Shale, a not-perfect but far cleaner fuel, allowed the US to transition away from dirtier fuels and grow the economy while doing it. And that is the key.
There is no way a nation can better insulate homes or move away from the internal combustion engine without having created the wealth to do so. Politicians charging after a green agenda without thinking it through has led to historic policy blunders that could have been avoided if Governments dropped their fixation for picking winners. Who can forget the diesel emissions scandal, where filthy diesel cars were massively incentivised within the EU as they produce 15 per cent less CO2 than petrol.
While impressive electric cars were being developed in the United States, EU bureaucrats fell for the car lobby’s overtures and mercilessly promoted a fuel that emits four times more nitrogen dioxide than petrol and 22 times more general pollutants. In bending to vested interests and steering investment towards this sector, the EU may well have hindered green advances on a global scale.
In 2009 the EU made the disastrous decision to ban incandescent light bulbs by 2011. At the time governments began promoting instead the uglier, slower, harsher and more expensive ‘compact fluorescent lamp’ bulbs – which are impossible to recycle due to the mercury they contain. The EU-promoted ‘CFL’ bulbs, which cost considerably more than incandescent ones, saved around 50 per cent on energy used. Yet little did regulators know that the world was just a couple of years away from mature LED bulbs. Unlike Government-promoted CFL options, LEDs did not take up to a minute to fully turn on, used 90% less energy, were brighter, longer lasting, and crucially far cheaper than even traditional bulbs.
Time and time again when Governments have sought to direct investment at the behest of lobby groups, the results have stunted technological progress. Banning, subsidising, taxing, and directing from the centre are just about the very worst ways to bring about a better society.
In the early 1900s, the US military ploughed millions of dollars into the work of Samuel Langley, who was attempting to build the world’s first aircraft. Little were they to know that despite their enormous investment and massive teams – or perhaps because of that – their aircraft would never fly. In fact it was two unknown non-Government funded bicycle engineers, Orville and Wilbur Wright, who were able to produce a lighter, nimbler aircraft – one that could actually fly – on a shoestring budget.
The Tories mustn’t throw away the lessons of the last century. We know the only way to fight climate change (without descending to the poor, nasty, brutish, and short pre- industrial revolution world) is technological progress. And we know that heavy handed Government interference of the kind demanded by environmentalists only serves to undermine that. One does sometimes wonder if the shrewdest environmental campaigners know all this – and have simply latched onto the cause of climate change as the latest vehicle for their regressive, luddite, anti-growth, protectionist, Malthusian worldview.
The ‘living off your own allotment’ worldview needs little thinking about to realise the desperate poverty and illness such a society would inflict on its people through lack of technology, medicine, and enterprise. The happy reality is the world is not far from cheap, reliable and abundant cleaner energy. And capitalism is already delivering. We’re on the verge of an electric vehicle revolution. Every year technology enables us to do more with less. Efficiency is growth. And despite protestation from green campaigners, nuclear power is safe, cheap, and abundant. No government could possibly imagine the miraculous innovations that history tells us will appear in the next decade.
The message to Boris has to be simple: keep calm, ignore the regressive hippies, and let the market do its job.
Thursday, September 24, 2020
The myth of the ‘stolen country’
Thursday, April 16, 2020
Evidence from 113 Studies: one aspirin per week can slash cancer risk by 40%
One aspirin per week could slash cancer risk by 40 per cent, study finds
Aspirin has previously been linked to a reduction in the risk of bowel cancer, but new research shows the power of the everyday painkiller may stretch to other digestive tract cancers - including throat, esophageal, stomach and intestinal.
Scientists looked at evidence from 113 studies investigating various digestive cancers. The results showed regular use of aspirin - defined as taking one or two tablets a week - was linked to a significant reduction in the risk of developing all but one cancer.
The drug reduced the risk of developing cancer of the gastric cardia (the part of the stomach that connects to the oesophagus) and hepato-biliary (liver, gallbladder and bile ducts) by 39 per cent.
Bowel cancer was lowered by more than a quarter, oesophageal cancer by more than a third, stomach cancer by 36 per cent and pancreatic cancer by 22 per cent. Studies of head and neck cancer did not show a significant reduction in risk.
The study - the largest and most comprehensive analysis of the link between aspirin and digestive cancers to date - was published in the journal Annals of Oncology.
Dr Carlo La Vecchia, senior author from the University of Milan, said: "The findings for pancreatic and other digestive tract cancers may have implications for the prevention of these highly lethal diseases.
"People who are at high risk of the disease are most likely to gain the greatest benefits from aspirin."
The authors advise people to consult a doctor before taking aspirin for the prevention of cancer due to potential complications.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/04/15/one-aspirin-per-week-could-slash-cancer-risk-40-per-cent-study/?WT.mc_id=e_DM1235800&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_FAM_New_ES&utmsource=email&utm_medium=Edi_FAM_New_ES20200416&utm_campaign=DM1235800
Friday, October 25, 2019
When you do the Maths, a Carbon-Free World may be Impossible
Inconvenient Energy Realities
July 1, 2019 The math behind “The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking”A week doesn’t pass without a mayor, governor, policymaker or pundit joining the rush to demand, or predict, an energy future that is entirely based on wind/solar and batteries, freed from the “burden” of the hydrocarbons that have fueled societies for centuries. Regardless of one’s opinion about whether, or why, an energy “transformation” is called for, the physics and economics of energy combined with scale realities make it clear that there is no possibility of anything resembling a radically “new energy economy” in the foreseeable future. Bill Gates has said that when it comes to understanding energy realities “we need to bring math to the problem.”
He’s right. So, in my recent Manhattan Institute report, “The New Energy Economy: An Exercise in Magical Thinking,” I did just that. Herein, then, is a summary of some of bottom-line realities from the underlying math. (See the full report for explanations, documentation and citations.)
Realities About the Scale of Energy Demand
1. Hydrocarbons supply over 80% of world energy: If all that were in the form of oil, the barrels would line up from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, and that entire line would grow by the height of the Washington Monument every week.
2. The small two percentage-point decline in the hydrocarbon share of world energy use entailed over $2 trillion in cumulative global spending on alternatives over that period; solar and wind today supply less than 2% of the global energy.
3. When the world’s four billion poor people increase energy use to just one-third of Europe’s per capita level, global demand rises by an amount equal to twice America’s total consumption.
4. A 100x growth in the number of electric vehicles to 400 million on the roads by 2040 would displace 5% of global oil demand.
5. Renewable energy would have to expand 90-fold to replace global hydrocarbons in two decades. It took a half-century for global petroleum production to expand “only” 10-fold.
6. Replacing U.S. hydrocarbon-based electric generation over the next 30 years would require a construction program building out the grid at a rate 14-fold greater than any time in history.
7. Eliminating hydrocarbons to make U.S. electricity (impossible soon, infeasible for decades) would leave untouched 70% of U.S. hydrocarbons use—America uses 16% of world energy.
8. Efficiency increases energy demand by making products & services cheaper: since 1990, global energy efficiency improved 33%, the economy grew 80% and global energy use is up 40%.
9. Efficiency increases energy demand: Since 1995, aviation fuel use/passenger-mile is down 70%, air traffic rose more than 10-fold, and global aviation fuel use rose over 50%.
10. Efficiency increases energy demand: since 1995, energy used per byte is down about 10,000-fold, but global data traffic rose about a million-fold; global electricity used for computing soared.
11. Since 1995, total world energy use rose by 50%, an amount equal to adding two entire United States’ worth of demand.
12. For security and reliability, an average of two months of national demand for hydrocarbons are in storage at any time. Today, barely two hours of national electricity demand can be stored in all utility-scale batteries plus all batteries in one million electric cars in America.
13. Batteries produced annually by the Tesla Gigafactory (world’s biggest battery factory) can store three minutes worth of annual U.S. electric demand.
14. To make enough batteries to store two-day’s worth of U.S. electricity demand would require 1,000 years of production by the Gigafactory (world’s biggest battery factory).
15. Every $1 billion in aircraft produced leads to some $5 billion in aviation fuel consumed over two decades to operate them. Global spending on new jets is more than $50 billion a year—and rising.
16. Every $1 billion spent on datacenters leads to $7 billion in electricity consumed over two decades. Global spending on datacenters is more than $100 billion a year—and rising.
Realities About Energy Economics
17. Over a 30-year period, $1 million worth of utility-scale solar or wind produces 40 million and 55 million kWh respectively: $1 million worth of shale well produces enough natural gas to generate 300 million kWh over 30 years.
18. It costs about the same to build one shale well or two wind turbines: the latter, combined, produces 0.7 barrels of oil (equivalent energy) per hour, the shale rig averages 10 barrels of oil per hour.
19. It costs less than $0.50 to store a barrel of oil, or its equivalent in natural gas, but it costs $200 to store the equivalent energy of a barrel of oil in batteries.
20. Cost models for wind and solar assume, respectively, 41% and 29% capacity factors (i.e., how often they produce electricity). Real-world data reveal as much as 10 percentage points less for both. That translates into $3 million less energy produced than assumed over a 20-year life of a 2-MW $3 million wind turbine.
21. In order to compensate for episodic wind/solar output, U.S. utilities are using oil- and gas-burning reciprocating engines (big cruise-ship-like diesels); three times as many have been added to the grid since 2000 as in the 50 years prior to that.
22. Wind-farm capacity factors have improving at about 0.7% per year; this small gain comes mainly from reducing the number of turbines per acre leading to 50% increase in average land used to produce a wind-kilowatt-hour.
23. Over 90% of America’s electricity, and 99% of the power used in transportation, comes from sources that can easily supply energy to the economy any time the market demands it.
24. Wind and solar machines produce energy an average of 25%–30% of the time, and only when nature permits. Conventional power plants can operate nearly continuously and are available when needed.
25. The shale revolution collapsed the prices of natural gas & coal, the two fuels that produce 70% of U.S. electricity. But electric rates haven’t gone down, rising instead 20% since 2008. Direct and indirect subsidies for solar and wind consumed those savings.
Energy Physics… Inconvenient Realities
26. Politicians and pundits like to invoke “moonshot” language. But transforming the energy economy is not like putting a few people on the moon a few times. It is like putting all of humanity on the moon—permanently.
27. The common cliché: an energy tech disruption will echo the digital tech disruption. But information-producing machines and energy-producing machines involve profoundly different physics; the cliché is sillier than comparing apples to bowling balls.
28. If solar power scaled like computer-tech, a single postage-stamp-size solar array would power the Empire State Building. That only happens in comic books.
29. If batteries scaled like digital tech, a battery the size of a book, costing three cents, could power a jetliner to Asia. That only happens in comic books.
30. If combustion engines scaled like computers, a car engine would shrink to the size of an ant and produce a thousand-fold more horsepower; actual ant-sized engines produce 100,000 times less power.
31. No digital-like 10x gains exist for solar tech. Physics limit for solar cells (the Shockley-Queisser limit) is a max conversion of about 33% of photons into electrons; commercial cells today are at 26%.
32. No digital-like 10x gains exist for wind tech. Physics limit for wind turbines (the Betz limit) is a max capture of 60% of energy in moving air; commercial turbines achieve 45%.
33. No digital-like 10x gains exist for batteries: maximum theoretical energy in a pound of oil is 1,500% greater than max theoretical energy in the best pound of battery chemicals.
34. About 60 pounds of batteries are needed to store the energy equivalent of one pound of hydrocarbons.
35. At least 100 pounds of materials are mined, moved and processed for every pound of battery fabricated.
36. Storing the energy equivalent of one barrel of oil, which weighs 300 pounds, requires 20,000 pounds of Tesla batteries ($200,000 worth).
37. Carrying the energy equivalent of the aviation fuel used by an aircraft flying to Asia would require $60 million worth of Tesla-type batteries weighing five times more than that aircraft.
38. It takes the energy-equivalent of 100 barrels of oil to fabricate a quantity of batteries that can store the energy equivalent of a single barrel of oil.
39. A battery-centric grid and car world means mining gigatons more of the earth to access lithium, copper, nickel, graphite, rare earths, cobalt, etc.—and using millions of tons of oil and coal both in mining and to fabricate metals and concrete.
40. China dominates global battery production with its grid 70% coal-fueled: EVs using Chinese batteries will create more carbon-dioxide than saved by replacing oil-burning engines.
41. One would no more use helicopters for regular trans-Atlantic travel—doable with elaborately expensive logistics—than employ a nuclear reactor to power a train or photovoltaic systems to power a nation.
Mark P. Mills is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a McCormick School of Engineering Faculty Fellow at Northwestern University, and author of Work in the Age of Robots, published by Encounter Books.
Saturday, July 27, 2019
If there’s just one thing you need to read on climate science…
This year, the world will spend $US162 billion ($230bn) subsidising renewable energy, propping up inefficient industries and supporting middle-class homeowners to erect solar panels, according to the International Energy Agency. In addition, the Paris Agreement on climate change will cost the world from $US1 trillion to $US2 trillion a year by 2030. Astonishingly, neither of these hugely expensive policies will have any measurable impact on temperatures by the end of the century.I could easily quote the whole article, and maybe I should). This, in my mind, has always been the problem with the current approach to the greenhouse effect, which became global warming, which became climate change, which most recently became climate emergency:
Climate campaigners want to convince us that not only should we maintain these staggering costs, but that we should spend a fortune more on climate change, since our very survival is allegedly at stake. But they are mostly wrong, and we’re likely to end up wasting trillions during the coming decades. I will outline how we could spend less, do a better job addressing climate change, and help far more effectively with many of the world’s other ills…
The present approach to climate change isn’t working. If fully implemented, analysis of the leading climate-economic models shows that the Paris Agreement will cost $US1 trillion to $US2 trillion every year in slowed economic growth. Our response to climate change is so expensive because alternative energy sources remain expensive and inefficient in most scenarios. It is still very expensive to switch from fossil fuels — hence the fortune being spent on subsidies, to little overall effect.
- The actions proposed under all the relevant international treaties and agreements so far to tackle the CO2 emissions will have a negligible effect on global temperatures and climate while at the same time sporting a mind-boggling price tag and therefore a dire impact on economy and standard of life across the world.
- This is because the world needs energy* and if that energy won’t be provided by fossil fuels it has to be provided by various “alternative”, “green”, “renewable” sources, which at this point in time are significantly more expensive than traditional carbon-based energy.
- To solve the problem of the high cost and save us the economic and social consequences of such high cost, instead of subsidising the renewables to make them more economical vis-a-vis coal and gas, we should instead be investing in research to develop technologies that will actually in the long term make the renewables cheaper than fossil fuels and as reliable in provision of base power.
- As Lomborg never tires of pointing out, people across the developing world suffer from a multitude of problems which have nothing to do with global temperatures, but are not as sexy as all the usual hot causes that transfix the activists in the developed world, like climate change or AIDS. They might not be sexy but they are relatively inexpensive to fix and can have far-reaching positive implications for the world. Imagine if some of the money we currently waste under the pious guise of addressing climate change was redirected to such ends.
- We should strive towards cheap and reliable renewable energy, whether or not you believe that CO2 is harmful to the Earth. Fossil fuels, while more abundant than their critics posit, are finite and unevenly distributed. Renewables, on the other hand, have the potential to democritise energy by bringing it to all those who currently lack a sufficient supply on account of their paucity of natural resources or the economic underdevelopment. Thus, they can help to break the vicious cycle of poverty by spurring economic development with all its positive externalities for the “bottom billion” or two.
*Not according to everyone; many on the post-industrial left see climate change as a great opportunity to combat modern capitalism with its “fetish” for economic growth. Take, for example, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff:
Chakrabarti had an unexpected disclosure. “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal,” he said, “is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all.” Ricketts greeted this startling notion with an attentive poker face. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” Chakrabarti continued. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”In other words, some sort of socialism, a notion that would strike old-style Marxists as ridiculous though they would no doubt appreciate the naked and shameless cunning in the pursuit of one’s radical political ends.
Arthur Chrenkoff blogs at The Daily Chrenk, where this piece also appears.
Tuesday, July 02, 2019
Socialism and Capitalism Explained
Socialism and Capitalism
By George FriedmanSocialism is a global political movement that emerged from the French Revolution. Its goal was to speak for the dispossessed, only sometimes as a democratic political party. In all of its guises, it has been a powerful political force in most of the world. In the United States, however, it has been relegated to the political margins, seen largely as alien to the American ethos. It has now emerged explicitly as a subject of debate in American politics and therefore requires some thought.
Origin Stories
The important difference between socialism and capitalism – even more important than what each actually preaches – is that capitalism is less an intellectual or moral system than a reality born of the industrial revolution. Socialism, on the other hand, has always been an intellectual movement, crafted by intellectuals such as Saint-Simon, Fourier, Lassalle and Marx, all of whom made the moral case for socialism and imagined what such a system would look like. These intellectuals loathed inequality and despised the intellectual shallowness of the rich and sought to create a political movement that could bring their vision to life. It was commandeered by politicians such as Karl Kautsky in Germany, and Vladimir Lenin in Russia.
Socialism argued that the private ownership and control of investment capital, which created the means of production, was flawed in two ways. First, it diverted wealth from the common good to the private benefit of the rich. Second, in investing on the basis of the highest return on capital, capitalism neglected investment in social goods that had a lower or no return on capital. It limited human possibilities.
In general, socialism advocates a radical restructuring of society – the means of production should be transferred to state control, and the state should determine the investment strategy. There were three underlying goals to this argument. First, that socialism would make possible the political equality that wealth inequality did not allow for. Second, that the state would produce for the common good, since state officials would not profit from the decisions they made. Finally, that the state would be controlled democratically, and therefore be under control of the public.
Capitalism did not attempt to make the case for itself. In fact, it was not something imagined and planned for. It was the reality that emerged alongside the Industrial Revolution. The industrial revolution could not develop without investment, and the investors hoped to make a profit, and that profit was reinvested. The capitalists’ wealth came to dwarf that of the old European aristocracy, and it grew larger as capitalists pursued more wealth. The capitalist did not contemplate the virtue of wealth, or the effects of industrialism on the human condition. The capitalist considered the moment and acted on it. Capitalism was not an ideology, nor did intellectuals defend it until the 20th century, when Hayek and Friedman, among others, sought to make the moral case. In the United States, capitalists bound their work to Christian notions of charity, but they had no systematic vision of their own.
Capitalism’s greatest explicator was Adam Smith, who wrote “The Wealth of Nations.” In it, he described how individual decisions, driven by self-interest, would culminate in an increase in the wealth of nations. In one of his lesser-read books, “The Theory of Moral Sentiments,” Smith made the argument that moral principles do not derive from external theories (by which he implicitly meant socialism and religion) but rather from pragmatic, necessary solutions to problems. So, Smith’s ultimate defense of capitalism is that it worked. But by this he meant that it maximized wealth – not that it limited inequality.
The capitalists determined where money was invested, based on expectations of returns on capital. In this sense, they controlled the direction capitalism would go, in that they didn’t care where it went so long as their wealth increased. From this came the towering structures of Euro-American civilization, along with the reality that the wealth of nations left vast swaths of society serving the system as workers and excluded many others from the system. Human action usually comes at the expense of others.
Reallocating Capital
The socialist argument was that, so long as capitalists pursued their own immediate interests, the wealth of society would accumulate in their hands, and the matters of inequality and poverty would not be addressed. At the core of the socialist argument was that the very indifference to ideology by the capitalists would create vast wealth for the few, without alleviating the suffering of the many. Therefore, there had to be a reallocation of capital. Some capital would go toward easing the suffering of the excluded. But even more would go to the state, which would assume responsibility for investment. The state was a superior agent of investment the individuals making investment decisions would either be civil servants or an elected representative of the people, and, having no personal interest in the outcome, would make the best decisions possible based on democratically defined ends.
The clash between capitalism and socialism has many dimensions, but the most important is this: Capitalist investment is not centralized. Investment capital comes from many sources, and there are countless investors making decisions. The diversification of capital limits the consequences of any single decision. It makes capitalism vulnerable to cycles and fads, but devastation is not the same as annihilation. It can and (and regularly does) recover from devastation. But the emphasis is on what the investment process can recover from, not the havoc that the devastation might cause to the public.
Socialism places confidence in the state, and control of the state in the hands of the public. The public as a whole has an understanding of what it needs but is not sensitive to the price paid. The state, then, must either abide by the will of the many or make investment decisions regardless of the public will, but for the good of the public (or at least what the state regards as their good). Since the state is an abstraction, the decisions are actually made by state officials. Given the vastness of the decisions made by the state, it must devolve to an army of civil servants who individually hold minimal power, but who collectively would take the place of investors, unbound by the demand of self-interest.
Democratic socialism cannot be democratic because of the scope and scale of modern economies. It either evolves in a Soviet direction, to name one extreme, or, as in oft-cited Sweden, leaves most investment decisions to private investors, taxing them and transferring money to the rest of society. In the Soviet model, the state tries to manage mid-level civil servants by terrifying them with death. In the Swedish model, the battle is formed by demands of increasing social benefits and decreasing investment capital.
Under capitalism, the diversification of capital sources protects against bad decisions made by centralized governments. But it must, by its nature, create inequality and occasional social crisis. The flow of money into the hands of the investor class must generate crises as industries are shut down and as new ones are created. The speed of what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction” generates rapid and intense crises that can turn just as rapidly into social unrest, chaos or repression. Capitalism has generally solved this in the same way that social democracy has: It has left investment to private investors and then imposed taxes on them to cushion social dislocation.
In short, the distinction between modern industrial capitalism and social democracy is minimal. Leaving aside socialist fantasies about the abolition of greed or capitalist fantasies in which a state will expect nothing from its citizens, the two systems have more or less merged. Capitalists and socialists accept private investment. Both expect economies to grow and from that growth they will pay taxes. In both Sweden and the United States, taxes are hated by the public, but the benefits are loved. Still, the political system decides the taxes and the politicians do what they were meant to do in a democracy – pander to the public. What may differentiate one politician from the next is the amount of taxation they propose, but even that is used to balance the system.
Even within today’s hybrid system, democratic socialism has risen as a topic of debate within the Democratic Party. I would argue that the reasons for the emergence can be explained this way. The Democratic Party was defeated by Donald Trump in the last presidential election because he seemed to speak for the interests of the industrial working class that is in decline. This class had been the foundation of the New Deal coalition that had dominated the Democrats and from which the Democrats shifted, focusing instead on other sectors of society.
The conversation around socialism in the Democratic Party represents an attempt to woo the voters feeling intense pain who voted for Trump. Whether this group will respond is a key question. For the most part, the conversation will appeal most to those already committed to the Democratic left. That is where the battle is going on now. So it seems designed to win the Democratic nomination and lose the general election. But I am not a politician, so they may see things I can’t. What I can say is that the discussion of socialism is purely symbolic and intended to indicate a commitment to unspecified radical change. But structurally, there is little there that can substantially change the economic system, because there has been a massive convergence between the socialists rising from the French Revolution and the industrialists rising in the factories of Edinburgh. The debate is functionally archaic – but perhaps of some symbolic power.