Albanese on Energy and Climate

[update: this turned out to be sadly wrong.]

Currently I rate Anthony Albanese as the smartest PM Australia has ever had. His new government hasn't made a misstep, despite temptations to make hurried populist decisions. However I have been intending to vote against Labor for the first time in 50 years of voting, because we can't afford 6 years of the government's energy policy as it has been expressed.

Yesterday we had two seemingly unrelated announcements: the creation of a tough Australia-wide Environmental Protection Agency; and the plan for the federal government to hold auctions to provide each state with firm, reliable, dispatchable, renewable energy.

I support nuclear power because, to my knowledge, there is no other way to make firm, reliable, dispatchable, carbon-free energy. And the government's auction shows that they understand the need for such energy.

The renewable energy business is always begging to be exempted from environmental rules. "Let us kill birds, dump used toxic solar panels in land fill, destroy river ecosystems, ..." they say. Maybe the creation of the EPA is to let them know that they are not going to get away with that. Below I list some possible contenders for this firm renewable energy, and why I don't think they will be acceptable. If you have other options, please let me know in the comments on twitter (https://twitter.com/rks987).

[For any non-Australian readers: The right in Australia is 2 parties that work together most of the time, the National Party in regional areas and the Liberal Party mostly in cities. After the left (ALP) won the last election the National Party leader said that he would like to work with the ALP on a bipartisan push to give nuclear energy the consideration it deserves. The new Liberal leader also, later, joined the nuclear push, but clearly wants to use it to split the ALP, rather than hoping for a bipartisan arrangement.]

So I wonder: Does Albanese have a plan to diffuse the whole energy-nuclear situation that threatens to split the ALP? If the auctions don't produce any acceptable solution then he can say "We did our best, but it seems that, as all other major economies are finding, nuclear is the only answer.". That will surely bring the voters on side. Of course, if they do find a good renewable solution then that will be even better. It could even split the Right.

Possible "firm reliable dispatchable" Renewable Energy options

1. Wood

A shocking amount of supposedly renewable energy is made by burning wood. This might be "renewable" over many decades, but in the medium term, to avoid 2 degrees rise, it is worse than burning coal. The wood wouldn't be from a new plantation, that takes too long. It would either be from an existing plantation intended for wood products, or it would be native forest. There is no way burning native forest will pass the EPA. If we burn wood intended for wood products, then we have to import instead for that use. I'll be surprised if that can be done.

2. Bush

To prevent bush fires we need to clear a lot of undergrowth in the forests. Maybe we could gather it and burn it for energy instead of doing preventative burning in place. I have no idea if there would be enough, but collecting it would be difficult. Also, burning in place leaves the ash as fertiliser, so this plan might not pass the environmental test.

3. Geothermal

There was an attempt in South Australia to drill to hot rocks for geothermal energy. You probably need to do fracking to get the fluid you pump down one hole to make its way to the other. Drilling technology has improved since then. However this would be experimental, so hardly biddable.

4. Dams

Dams are always an environmental disaster. If there were good places for dams we'd have done it already.

5. Tidal

Australia has some great tidal options, but they're in the protected and remote NW: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-06-15/why-the-kimberley-has-australias-biggest-tides/9875328

Climate Crisis: Getting the facts right

 There's still some denial, there's still some anger, but mostly Australia has moved on to bargaining ("we'll just buy carbon credits"), and sadness ("we'll do the minimum to be respectable").  It's time to move on to acceptance. Acceptance means accepting that the effects of climate change in Australia can't be averted by Australia's actions alone. We need a worldwide solution. What should Australia's role be in designing and implementing such a worldwide solution?

The world's actions or inactions are going to affect a lot of powerful individuals, businesses, and nations. So, not surprisingly, we are swimming in a sea of misinformation. This is normal in business, but this time we can't afford it. The world needs a powerful team to take on these powerful forces.

Australia can be a leader in such a team. Indeed, we can start by ourselves, while striving to bring others on board in a controlled way.

It isn't just misinformation. There's is also a simple lack of obviously needed numerical information. Here, for example, Simon Michaux does the sums on the materials needed for one popular proposed energy solution:

The Climate Crisis demands a serious response. It is an engineering problem, not a science problem. Scientists are useful because they are well informed, though often in narrow ways, and they are often lateral thinkers. Scientists are adding interesting information to the conversation, such as clever ideas for fusion energy, that just adds to the information overload.

Because this is a crisis, the government can say: "We are going to stop supporting a lot of research that has no relevance to preventing or adapting to climate change, and put that research effort into an organised effort to engineer solutions to that problem. We don't expect a unique solution to be found, as different solutions will have different pros and cons. Evaluating such pros and cons is a political process.".

1. Don't wait to act.

Investigations often delay action, but we can't afford that. We need to proceed as fast as possible based on our current understanding. But we need to investigate thoroughly and continuously and adjust course when that is indicated. Politicians hate to do that, since they like to pretend to a god-like omnipotence. It's time for them to support the scientists and engineers.

2. Get the numbers.

Ideally the initial team includes people who already have expertise in determining the numbers and in knowing the relevant literature and sources of information. A lot of work has been done, such as the seminal work of the late Professor Sir David MacKay (https://www.withouthotair.com/), up to and including Simon Michaux above. It should be possible to quickly put up an alpha-level draft based on such sources. We then expect a process of vigorous open discussion and debate to improve the numbers, which will then flow into the planning options and their associated pros and cons.

These numbers are not just about reducing emissions (from energy, concrete, etc) but also about removing CO2 in various ways (such as ocean fertilisation), and also reacting appropriately to climate change (such as helping species get to new locations, or preparing for sea level rise).

3. Brutal evaluation of information sources.

The real work of getting to the best solution is to find the sources of misinformation and label them as such. Most importantly we need to find individuals and organisations that are knowingly spreading misinformation and get them named, shamed, and removed from the process. This should involve judges and the legal profession. However interim orders need to be made quickly so that the total process doesn't get bogged down.

This is the scary bit because it involves rich and powerful individuals, organisations and even governments. In Australia we have seen how this can go, when the mining lobby's advertising campaign forced the government to retreat on a tax on super profits. Some of the beneficiaries of the fossil fuel industry are much more dangerous than that.

4. Australia's role

Australia is one of the richest countries in the world. It is in our interest to get this solved. First we should get involved in sorting out the facts, as above.

Total solutions don't have to be the same everywhere. Australia has a lot of renewables, so maybe that is the best thing for us to do, even though many places cannot do that (as David MacKay explained for the UK and Germany has proved). However I would like to see us designing and building and implementing solutions that can be applied in developing nations that will need, and deserve, the world's support.

Nuclear Future: China versus USA

The world is belatedly waking up to the fact that there is no route to net zero without a huge amount of nuclear power. The existing PWR reactors have been extremely successful and have proved to be extremely safe. However there are multiple opportunities for technological progress, and many of the world's requirements will not be met by the current designs.

At a government level, the USA has only recently become supportive of research into nuclear energy. However the entrepreneurial spirit in America has ensured that there are many private companies pursuing a range of designs. Some of them will now get more financial support and less regulatory obstruction.

Meanwhile in China the government has initiated research and put a lot of money into particular ideas. For example they have built a substantial experimental Thorium molten salt reactor. It seems this project was initiated by a CCP princeling.

This brings me to the reason why I expect the USA to come out the winner in this race. The Chinese are very strong on respect for authority, respect for superiors, respect for seniority. I expect that the people working on the molten salt reator, and others on other projects, are thinking "My job is to make this plan work that has come from above".

What you need to win is a commitment to the team effort, plus a respect for the enemy rather than respect for superiors. And for a technical challenge, like building a better nuclear reactor, the enemy is reality. Respecting reality means doing everything you can to understand it, and being willing and unashamed to retreat when you can't defeat it.

In a recent development there was a large improvement in powerful superconducting magnets. American researchers realised that they could now make a much smaller tokamak reactor. And being American they didn't file that thought away. Instead they said "Let's build it" and that's what they're doing.

I suppose it will be good if China works out how to make cheap safe nuclear power and saves the world from climate change. However I hope and expect that American competitive and entrepreneurial spirit will win the race.

P.S. There are other promising commercial ventures outside America, including Copenhagen Atomics in Denmark and HB11 (fusion) in Australia.

2 Plans to Progress towards CANZUK

CANZUK (https://grampsgrumps.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-canzuk-solution.html) has a lot of support, but is currently stalled. Here are a couple of ideas.

The CANZUK nations already have a theoretically unified head of state. In practice the Governor-Generals (GGs) act independently of the monarchy. In Australia there was a recent event where the GG believed that he should do whatever the PM said. I think if we asked the Australian people they would say that the GG should act as the umpire of politics and shouldn't do anything in secret. Anyway my suggestion here is that the Monarchy plus the 3 GGs should form an official CANZUK Head of State Committee to formalise the roles and keep them consistent. This will also keep the idea of a more significant CANZUK union in the public consciousness.

My 2nd idea is to progress greater cooperation between the UK and Australia. The two countries are complementary. The UK has a lot of people, but limited resources. Australia has resources, but would really like nuclear deterence, nuclear energy and compatibly educated people. A core problem is the distance, but this lends itself to leading the world with a high speed, low carbon shipping industry using nuclear powered ships. It would be great to get Canada involved also: https://grampsgrumps.blogspot.com/2022/08/failsafe-nuclear-shipping-and-canausuk.html.

Failsafe Nuclear Shipping and a CANAUSUK solution

 The NRC approval of a NuScale design is an important milestone for new nuclear power. The design features failsafe capabilities:

• The control rods which stop the chain reaction are not lowered by power. Instead they are held up with power and fall down without power, turning the reactor off.
• The cooling is by immersion in water which cools by convection. The water near the reactor warms and rises, moves to the side where it cools and falls, thus cycling around without the need of power.

For a nuclear powered ship we will use seawater to quickly cool the inner (pure) water, so that not as much is required normally. Power would be used to pump the seawater out, so that the ship doesn't carry more than needed, but when the power is cut the seawater will fill a space so that there is enough to do power-free cooling, as above.

I'm a supporter of CANZUK, in fact I independently invented the acronym before I knew other had beaten me to it (seven years ago: https://grampsgrumps.blogspot.com/2015/05/the-canzuk-solution.html). However we'll leave NZ out of the following because they are so anti-nuclear. Let us consider a CANAUSUK federation of Canada, Australia and the UK. Our united country might well be called The Maritime Kingdom, or Maritimia.

Maritimia is a natural ally of the US, but it is a parlimentary democracy and Kingdom. It is well connected by Internet and air transport, but to move substantial physical stuff around it would be nice if sea transport was faster and carbon-free. The ideal solution is nuclear powered shipping. A nice advantage that Maritimia has, is that it is not opposed to government led commercial activity. Indeed I think public acceptance of nuclear shipping will be enhanced if it was under the direct control of the well-trusted CANAUSUK governments,

Beyond that, the whole world will be well served by nuclear shipping free of carbon and other pollution. The CANAUSUK governments are well respected and I think many places would be comfortable using nuclear shipping from such a confederation government. Shipping is a part of the world's CO2 problem, and this is a way to address it.

Bonobos and sex symmetry and maybe us

Bonobos are the closest species to humans, looking similar to Chimps but with a very different social structure. Humans share many traits with bonobos, perhaps more than we always admit.

If you put a male and female bonobo together in captivity, then the slightly larger male will dominate and have preferential access to food and other resources. However if you put a male in with two females then the females will cooperate and dominate. That's how it was explained, probably in one of Frans de Waal's excellent books. But just recently I had a think about this.

There is a symmetry between the sexes which works like this: If one sex has some characteristic that is advantageous, then the other sex will have a significant reaction to this. Commonly they will want to evaluate how well individuals perform, but also they will adjust their behaviour to fit in.

So I wonder if it is really necessary for the two females to explicitly cooperate to dominate the male. It seems more likely the male has a different response when there are two females, based on the knowledge that they will cooperate.

I suspect humans are like that. If there are two or more women together, then men are inclined to behave themselves. However humans aren't like bonobos:

• Humans pair up to raise babies. Women prefer not to share a good husband if they can find one.
• Humans have mostly solved the problem of safe relations between one man and one woman. The real estate industry says that 90% of real estate decisions are taken by the woman in the relationship. I think this extends to all aspects of family life. In the main women dominate that part of life and most men are happy with that.

Most young men are happy to find a nice partner who will look after family life and tell them what to do. However there is a limited supply of such men. Rather than giving up, I think women should also be open to setting up a family situation with another woman (or even more), and keeping male company to well controlled situations where, in particular, more than one woman is present.

There are many cultures in which the male and female worlds are significantly separated so I think this sort of arrangement is quite compatible with human nature. Indeed I think many young women today bring men in to their bed in their parents' home. This is a safe way to start on adult life, and if babies arrive then grandparents are usually delighted to help with that.

Who to eliminate in STV (Preferential) Voting

I just worked out: You shouldn't eliminate candidates from the bottom (unless the following fails). Instead, eliminate every candidate who can't win on a preference distribution against any other remaining candidate. Thank you Brisbane and McNamara electorates (in the Australian 2022 election) for pointing this out.

If a seat elects N people then eliminate everybody who can't get a quota against any other set of remaining N candidates. This could be computationally expensive, particularly when combined with my method for determining the quota (https://grampsgrumps.blogspot.com/2020/06/counting-votes-in-optional-preferential.html) when every set will lead to a different quota.

In case anyone misses the point, this is why we sometimes fall back on eliminating the lowest vote: Suppose 3 candidates are left A, B and C. If A is left out B beats C, if B is left out C beats A, if C is left out A beats B. So my proposal doesn't eliminate anyone.

Another idea I had once was that we send the top two candidates to parliament, but when they vote in parliament their vote is weighted by their electoral vote. The main advantage of this is that it doesn't matter if electorates have different sizes, so they can be more uniform. To do this with the above plan: First do it as an electorate determining 2 winners, with quota 1/3. Then those two get all their first preferences plus votes transferred from eliminated candidates.

My understanding of COVID-19

Human cells that are in contact with the outside world include the gut, airways, and skin. These get replaced regularly because they are subject to damage and disease.

 Viruses infecting these externally accessible cells don't want to get into the blood stream and affect internal organs. They want people to be well enough to move around and infect other people. So we see that there are a lot of respiratory and throat viruses that cause mild disease, and this includes various coronaviruses.

The exceptions are diseases that have only recently made the jump from other species. Initially they can be quite dangerous. New variants will be more successful if they are milder. That's what we've seen with covid-19. Indeed, it doesn't seem unlikely that covid-19 will eventually settle down to be just another "cold".

When covid first hit, vaccination development started, and soon there was talk of the need to vaccinate the whole world. That didn't happen. The virus running unchecked in many poorer places led to variants, and concern was expressed that they might be more dangerous. But, as epidemiologists must have suspected, it was milder variants that won the day. One cannot help but wonder if this policy of benign neglect in other poorer countries was deliberate, or just, as it seemed to be, laziness. Sweden also let the disease run more than most richer places. Were they doing their bit to encourage milder variants?

Influenza never makes this change to milder variants. I presume this is because it is always making the jump from birds, so we're always dealing with new variants.

An interesting feature of the pandemic where I live was that there was initially denial that it spread through the air. So there was no recommendation to wear masks, though many did. At that time I tried to buy masks, but they were all sold out. Then the story changed and it was admitted that there was aerial transmission, and masks were recommended. And bingo, suddenly they were available everywhere. Was this a coincidence? I don't think so. They didn't want to even recommend masks when you couldn't get them. Soon after that they were required in many situations.

Transmission has always been low in outdoor settings with sunshine. So many of the bans that happened were undesirable. People would have been safer if they got some vitamin-D in the sun. I also think that we can provide more UV in indoor settings. A big UV lamp might be dangerous, but we can now provide strip lighting with small amounts of UV coming from multiple places and illuminating everywhere better than central lights. Unfortunately the anti-UV lobby has a big hold on the public imagination.

Nuclear versus Wind+Solar

Quoting John Baez tweet https://twitter.com/johncarlosbaez/status/1476608624936259589?s=20, I wrote this thread:

Supporting both is the best strategy for an important influencer like Dr Baez. I'm not an influencer and I think people should be aware of a few issues:

1. Voters with concerns for the environment support wind+solar. But the resulting RE industry is doing it for profit, not for the environment. For them nuclear is the enemy, just as it is for the fossil fuel industry.

2. The RE industry needs gas just as the gas industry needs RE. They are in an unholy anti-nuclear alliance. A lot of money goes from that alliance to supposedly environmental organisations which are then faced with perverse incentive in opposition to their claimed mission.

3. Nuclear done right avoids the environmentally destructive industrialisation of the landscape that is shown in the linked news item. We can also have less dams which are even worse for the environment (unless built by beavers).

Also somebody asked how to address fears about nuclear and I wrote:

(1) Address the exaggerated concerns about radiation. Veritasium's video is a good place to start: https://youtu.be/TRL7o2kPqw0. (2) Point out that Chernobyl didn't have containment and didn't cause the predicted cancer spike. (3) modern reactors have to be walk-away safe.

536 and the Anglo-Saxon non-invasion of England

 I've seen a couple of videos from respectable sources that downplay the idea that there was an Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain after the Romans left.

• https://youtu.be/glKe9njOB24 "Roman Britain  - The Work of Giants Crumbled" from the wonderful "Fall of Civilization Podcast" by Paul MM Cooper.
• https://youtu.be/OyCHtdpymNw "Is The Anglo-Saxon Invasion Of England A Myth?" from archeologist Francis Pryor.

I also watched a video about the infamous 536 AD volcanic eruption, which produced the worst year in history in Europe: https://youtu.be/HOw9UlRpfSA "The Mystery Volcanic Eruption in 536; The Year of Hell". This is from the excellent GeologyHub. There were 2 big eruptions close together. The 536AD one was probably in Iceland or Alaska and mostly affected the Northern Hemisphere. The 540AD one was even bigger, coming from near Krakatau (aka Krakatoa). It affected the whole world, but merely added to the misery in Europe.

Ship building and sailing expertise was improving rapidly in the centuries on either side of 410AD when the Romans left Britain. The North Sea was a highway, linking navigable rivers on both sides. So in 410 there were already plenty of people from across the North Sea enjoying the Pax Romana in Britain, and the work opportunities it provided, such as in the army.

The change when the Romans left was that land travel in Britain became less safe and less efficient. Travel by boat was the glue that linked parts of Britain together, but also linked Britain, particularly the East coast, to the people of North-West Europe.

After 410, trade was by boat, and the traders were from those Germanic people in NW Europe. They didn't speak Latin or the British languages. They probably all grew up speaking local languages, but a trade network like that develops a common language, just as bahasa Indonesia developed across Indonesia. That language became a natural lingua franca in England as well. Everybody had to learn it to trade, and it then facilitated communication with other people in England. And it was a prestige language. No wonder it took off, replacing Latin as "the language everyone knew".

Then 536-7 hit, and a little bit later 540. The weakened population was susceptible to the Plague of Justinian that then followed. It is almost certain that Britain was substantially depopulated. The people who had a big advantage in surviving were those who could turn to the sea for food. These were the people around the coast who were most influenced by the "Anglo-Saxon" ship traders. Surviving people then came together in communities that were more mixed, and were even more inclined to take up the common language and other culture of the wealthy traders.

The North Sea was a connected world that Britain was a part of. The connection is still apparent. As the Frisians say: "Good butter and good cheese is good English and good Frieze".

Update 2024-11-05:

A recent video suggest that England was substantially German/Scandinavian before the Roman invasion: https://youtu.be/XG9gWjSxK4g?si=5xaFGDiWze4_bazH. This makes so much sense. I've put a transcript of the relevant bit below, but I recommend the whole video.

13:13

For instance, there's a near complete absence

13:15

of celtic inscriptions in England outside Cornwall,

13:19

while such inscriptions are common in Ireland,

13:22

Wales, Scotland and Brittany.

13:25

So who were the Britons living in England

13:28

at the time of the roman invasion?

13:30

The history of pre roman coins in southern

13:33

Britain points to strong connections with belgic Gaul.

13:37

In fact, many of the tribes living

13:40

south and along the southern coast during

13:42

Caesar's time had belgic names or affiliations.

13:46

Caesar himself noted that these large belgic

13:49

settlements had replaced an earlier british population

13:53

which had retreated inland, possibly including the

13:56

large celtic tribe known as the Catuvellauni.

14:01

The roman historian Tacitus also remarked that the

14:04

languages of Britain and Gaul were quite similar.

14:08

However, the common language Tacitus referred

14:11

to may not have been celtic.

14:14

It's possible that the language spoken by the

14:16

Belgae in southern England was more germanic as

14:20

Caesar suggested, this hints that a germanic type

14:23

language might have already been spoken in England

14:26

before the roman invasion.

14:29

Recent research by Cambridge geneticist Peter Forster and

14:33

colleagues supports this idea, showing that the split

14:36

between Old English and continental germanic languages occurred

14:41

much earlier than the dark ages, suggesting that

14:44

English could have been a distinct branch of

14:46

the germanic language family before the Romans arrived.

14:51

Besides the belgic presence in the south, genetic

14:54

evidence also shows significant scandinavian incursions into northern

14:58

and eastern Britain, from Shetland to Anglia during

15:02

the neolithic period, long before the Romans.

15:05

These findings align with the strong

15:07

cultural exchanges across the North Sea

15:10

during the neolithic and Bronze Age.

15:13

Early anglian dialects, such as those found

15:16

in the old English epic Beowulf, owe

15:19

much of their vocabulary to scandinavian languages.

Climate Change and the wider Anthropocene

Climate Change and the wider Anthropocene

Brian Wang's proposals in Trillions Already Wasted in the Name of Fixing Climate Change But What Would Fix the Climate ? | NextBigFuture.com might or might not be optimal, but hopefully we can agree that "Costs of over $100 per ton of CO2 mitigation are stupid for a trillion-ton CO2 problem.".

I agree with Brian that improving the health and productivity of the world's oceans is a likely route to reducing atmospheric CO2 and ocean acidification. I was pleased to see that in Australia, CSIRO is investigating ocean fertilization: Ashes to ashes, dust to life: how iron improves anaemic oceans – CSIROscope.

Fire

One of the problems that is claimed to be caused by Climate Change is the increased severity of wildfires (called bushfires in Australia). There is a little bit of truth in this, because the increase in CO₂ and water in the air increases plant growth. But really the problem is this:

Vegetation without herbivores is an environmental disaster.

Fire is the herbivore of last resort.

The herbivores that you need to stop the understorey of forests building up to dangerous levels are the megafauna, which have sadly disappeared from most of the world outside Africa. I used to think that we needed to completely take over the role of megafauna, perhaps using fire as the Australian Aboriginal people did so successfully. The use of fire seems regrettable in our current situation, and it may not be necessary. We can use middle-sized fauna to eat through the underbrush (and also fertilise the land) if we help it by pushing over or cutting the larger stuff down to a level the animals can reach. Here's a video on using goats to improve the land: 

Desertification

Photos of degraded land are often shown as if associated with Climate Change. In fact the problem is almost invariably:

Herbivores without predators are an ecological disaster.

We see that in Australia with feral horses in the High Country, camels in central Australia, water buffalo in the north, and often kangeroos anywhere. Famously wolves were introduced to Yellowstone National Park and the land regenerated because the deer changed their behaviour. In places like Australia where plant growth varies a lot from year to year, preadators are very likely to suffer boom and bust that is out of sync with the herbivores. We see this with the mouse plague at the moment. By the time feral cat populations rise it is too late. At any rate there is no chance that Australia will introduce predators large enough to deal with the larger herbivores.

Humans need to fill the role of the top predator, and indeed we can do it in a way that protects the herbivore population as well as preserving the flora. Unfortunately there is strong opposition to culling. But this is where the pandemic comes to our rescue. People are now used to hearing "On the best scientific advice we are going to do X", where X is something people don't like. Let's extend this to environmental actions. "On the best scientific advice we are going to cull species X to allow the regeneration of its environment".

We need to manage the landscape of Australia much better, as the Aboriginal people did before European arrival. To do it we need to collect a lot more data to understand what's happening. Luckily technology is to hand. We can do a lot from satellites. On the ground we can install unattended intelligent monitoring that uses solar power and communicates its findings by 4G or satellite. Maybe people would like to adopt a monitoring station and check the pictures and sound and other data for things like: animals, birds, insects and weather.

This is important for addressing climate change because a landscape with a healthy level of vegetation will take advantage of the rain that falls and stash the water away. Rain on degraded land is much more likely to evaporate, and though it will fall as rain later that might be over water or other useless place. We know that where plants grow the soil improves and stores carbon.

Update 2022-06-21: This video on "Dingoes save the outback" makes the point beautifully: https://youtu.be/eRp2xp73n0s.

Drought

We all experience that drought years are warmer than rainy years. It is natural for the voters to assume that global warming will be associated with droughts. Droughts certainly raise the public's concern about the changing climate.

This is a misunderstanding. As the oceans warm there is increasing evaporation and, in general, more rain. Historically the ice ages were cold and dry, and the interglacials were, and are, warm and wet. The last time the world was significantly warmer than now, there were rain forests extending nearly to the poles.

However climate change does shuffle the deck. It is guaranteed to make most places wetter, but it can and probably will make some places drier. Some climate models show southern Australia getting drier, and that would be inconvenient because that is where most agricultural production happens.

Summary

Let's build on the experience of the pandemic to get scientific and engineering advice front and centre of the decisions we need to make to fix the problems of the Anthropocene, including the problem of global warming.

It is an easy out to declare that a particular problem is caused by global warming. All problems need to be addressed, and fixing the greenhouse gas levels is unlikely to be the immediate solution for any of them.

In the context of our increasingly wealthy worldwide civilization, global warming is a fixable problem that is not going to cause any huge loss of human life. It is very bad for biodiversity, particularly in the oceans where acidification makes it a double whammy. I think even the Greens know all this. If they really believed the danger was as great as they say, then how could they also continue to argue that nuclear power should not even be given any consideration?

There is now a lot of money getting allocated to address climate change. While most people are keen to fix the problem, there are also a lot who are thinking "How can I get my hands on that money?". Voters need to be aware of this so that they can turn on their radar, even if their radar isn't very good. Unfortunately the linkages between the wealthy and the politicians mean that governments will not protect us as much as we would hope. Parliamentary enquiry will be crucial and needs to be better resourced.

Interactive Video for Education

Recordeded lectures don't work well for education: Why too many recorded lecture videos may be bad for maths students' learning (theconversation.com). This applies to educational videos in general, not just lectures. Even if we pay attention, it just washes over us, giving a warm glow of understanding that actually lacks the depth to answer questions in the subject area. It is also boring when you know some of the subject matter and are keen to get to the stuff that is new to you.

It is now possible to control video in a browser with javascript. This is currently available in Safari, and with experimental settings in other browsers. This provides the opportunity to turn watching into a more engaged experience, and to pick up when the viewer has missed something. Here's the plan:

• With the lecture on one frame, another frame shows a sequence of easy multiple choice or short answer questions. The viewer is told not to guess.
• If the viewer answers questions before that part of the video has past, then the video will jump past that material.
• There is an "I don't know" answer for questions, but it is greyed out until the user gets past the relevant part of the video.
• When the video has gone past the material for a question then the video pauses waiting for the viewer to answer.
• If the viewer answer "I don't know" then something useful happens, such as showing an alternative explanation, or repeating a section, or getting a tutor or other viewer involved. Wrong answers might have more complicated responses.
• The video can also have some larger questions which are associated with longer breaks. These might require human evaluation, so might be timed to when a tutor is available to evaluate it.

Compensating for the loss of the Megafauna

The destruction of the Megafauna was an understandable mistake by our ancestors. They then learnt how to compensate for that loss using fire. Here's a nice article on how native Australians did that: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-05-11/historic-photos-guide-indigenous-burning-great-sandy-desert/100083720.

Global warming seems to start earlier than one would expect at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Of course a lot of other stuff was going on around the world at that time. One thing was whaling on a huge scale. Well it turns out that whale poo is an important fertiliser in the ocean, and dead whales carry a lot of carbon to the ocean floor. The whales will come back in a few centuries, but meanwhile we need to do their job to get the oceans full of fish again: https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/01/iron-fertilization-of-the-ocean-is-as-natural-as-whale-poop-and-it-can-save-the-planet.html.

And as in my previous post (https://grampsgrumps.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-plan-to-revive-mammoth-steppe-to.html), the megafauna were important in sequestering carbon in the Arctic, and replacement is not impossible.

Update: Another great video with stuff I didn't know about humans compensating for problems: https://youtu.be/cfl7mSG13e0. In this case, Thiamine deficiency in wild animals and fish, probably not related to megafauna extinction.

Update 2022-06-11: https://youtu.be/i4Hnv_ZJSQY is unbelievable. But it is even more unbelievable that this important solution to climate change and feeding the world has not been pursued. CSIRO was interested: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-12-19/volcanic-eruptions-provide-the-oceans-with-essential-nutrients/100711580, I hope they still are.

There was silly research that showed that phytoplanton take up carbon, but it all gets released when they die, so fertilization doesn't work. Of course many phytoplankton don't get to die of old age, and as their predators (and their predators, etc) defecate and later die, then a significant amount of carbon goes to the ocean floor. This video explains how some of that happens: https://youtu.be/Yo-AdMHu2ec.

The Plan to Revive the Mammoth Steppe to Fight Climate Change

An important video from Atlas Pro. I learnt a lot.

Democracy: The Threefold Way

Democracy: The Threefold Way

To make Democracy work as well as possible we need to get three things right:

• The Head of State should be the umpire of politics, not a player;

• The main (lower) house of parliament should have parties from the whole political spectrum, not two parties riven with internal divisions.

• Misinformation and disinformation are poison to democratic decision making. The second (upper) house should have the job of responding to these with open enquiries and using its powers to identify the sources of disinformation campaigns.

Head of State

The Head of State needs to combine ceremonial roles with acting as the umpire of the political process. This is the way the Governor-General acts in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. Having a Head of State with political power is a recipe for demagoguery which can easily tip over into dictatorship. Instead we want the political leader to be first among equals in a Cabinet drawn from and supported by the elected legislature which can change the leader quickly when necessary.

The failed attempt to make Australia a republic showed that the politicians were well aware that an elected President would be impossible to constrain to the ceremonial and umpiring roles of the Governor-General. However the voters were not interested in any other way of choosing a President. This proved to me that a monarchy is a valuable thing if a country has it. They do the ceremonial bit better, and they have the respect that an umpire needs. A remote monarch with a local representative has worked well in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.

We can add some needed democracy to monarchy. When voters are at the polls it is a convenient moment to allow them to vote to remove people from the succession, or even to request a vote on the removal of the current monarch.

The Main House of Parliament

The main (Lower) House of Parliament should be the main source of power, both legislative and administrative. Separating the two leads to endless difficulty. Single seat electorates lead to the 2 party system we see in most places. Instead we need to get the extremists out of the main parties and let them be represented in Parliament by small parties that accurately reflect their views. This allows sane centre parties to govern, and allows the majority to directly and personally confront extremist views on the floor of Parliament.

The government is formed by the Umpire (Head of State) speaking privately to those elected and finding a Prime Minister most likely to be supported by the House. The Prime Minister builds a Cabinet of senior ministers, who are constrained to resign if they wish to publicly disagree with Cabinet decisions. The Head of State should not dismiss the government unless it receives a vote of no confidence in the House.

The House of Review

In a democracy the people are the government. Even though it seems they act rarely and only through representatives, in fact the politicians are constantly aware of the voters feelings and beliefs.

To act wisely the voters need, as far as possible, to be well and accurately informed. We admit that sometimes the people want to be misinformed, and it will be hard to prevent that. The Constitution should clearly state the importance of correcting misinformation and identifying and calling out people creating and spreading disinformation.

The second (Upper) House of Parliament should be specifically tasked with pursuing the truth in open enquiries. It should be independently funded to support teams of well qualified researchers to support investigations into the correct information relevant to public policy, and into the sources of deliberate disinformation. It should be able to hold up legislation which does not contain adequate or correct justification.

Addendum

Compulsory voting impresses on people that voting is a duty, not some optional right. It has various advantages. It makes it hard to exclude groups through voter suppression. The processes that search for people who don't vote would also find people who vote more than once, if that were to ever become a problem. 

Preferential voting, also called "Single Transferable Vote", requires the voter to number the candidates in order. It isn't perfect and it is easy to prove that there is no perfect voting system. What it does do is allow people to vote for who they actually support without wasting their vote. The importance of this is consistently understated by those who think they are advantaged by first past the post voting.

I note my previous blog post on how to count votes in multicandidate elections with optional preferential voting: Gramp's Grumps: Counting votes in optional preferential.

There is also confusion in democracies because sometimes we vote for individuals and sometimes we feel we are voting for parties and feel betrayed when the winning candidate leaves the party but remains in Parliament. I have a post on addressing that: Gramp's Grumps: How to integrate political parties into the electoral process.

I have a proposal for a social media platform designed to resemble parliament in some ways. It's a bit nutty: Gramp's Grumps: AutoParliament. 

New ideas for Nuclear Power

 Sometimes things get missed. A couple have come up in reactor design recently.

1. To make a reactor work you have to transport the heat from where the reaction happens to where you want it to do work. Molten salt is a poor conductor of heat, so it used to be thought that it couldn't do the job. However because it is a liquid it can transport heat by convection instead of conduction. Moltex Energy noticed this, patented it, and have it as a core part of their plan to make energy cheaper than fossil fuels.

2. Helium has various properties that make it the gas of choice in High Temperature Gas Reactor (HTGR) designs. Rod Adams has recently pointed out that isotope 15 of Nitrogen, N15, shares these properties, plus having additional benefits. In particular it is similar to air, so lots of expertise and equipment for dealing with air is applicable. It is also very abundant since it makes up 0.35% of the nitrogen in our atmosphere. Of course separating it out is not trivial, but it is commercially available, so it is being done.

These things should come in threes. Perhaps my contribution is too trivial to mention, but here it is:

3. Nuclear power plants like to operate continuously. They need to charge enough to cover the sunk cost of construction (or equivalently to cover the interest payments on the construction cost). But the marginal cost of operation is very low, and perhaps in truth negative given the costs involved in having the flexibility to reduce production. Moltex Energy is putting their money on energy storage to soak up excess energy when demand and price are low, and sell later when both are high. Meanwhile there are many things we could do with energy if it was cheap. Consider fresh water. It is seriously under-priced because we ignore the environmental impact of taking it from natural river systems and from underground aquifers. But those natural options are hitting their limits. Current desalination methods are expensive to build because the theory is "energy is expensive, so we build an expensive solution that makes efficient use of energy". And once you've built an expensive system you want to run it as much as possible. But actually, in a world where there is often excess energy with nowhere to go, this argument is wrong. What you want is a cheap solution that you only need to run when energy is more or less free. There are other industrial processes where the clever search for energy efficiency is misguided, and a cheap design is economically preferable.

Money and Economics

Money and Economics

Modern human culture arrived and swept all before it from 100,000 to 30,000 years ago.  It has a lot of features, including symbolic communication (also known as "language"). Developing at that time, was the symbolic representation of wealth: the right to access resources. This was an essential part of the major evolution of modern humans that allows us to live in large groups, instead of in the small groups where everyone knew everyone else.

Money

Cowrie shells of a narrow range of sizes were one of the early forms of money. This is because it took a significant and fairly constant amount of effort to find them. This is the "proof of work" theory of money, which led to the invention of cryptocurrencies such as bitcoin. Gold and silver mining came to dominate money creation, even though the amount of work involved is more variable, leading to inflation events such as when Spain received a lot of South American gold, or when the Emperor of Mali took the Hajj pilgrimage in 1324 (seriously).

From the beginning, money has tried to do two jobs that are not perfectly compatible: one is to act as a medium of exchange, and the other is to act as a store of value. We are psychologically confused about this, with a strong expectation that it should act as a store of value. A common error is to assume that when money fails to act as a store of value then that is because of government printed paper money, and that would not be a problem with a "proof of work" money system such as gold. The assumption is that the money should retain a value equal to the work that went into it, but that is false because the work happened in the past and can't be undone, and the value is set by current events, as I'll describe later.

Bitcoin is a perfect example of money as a medium of exchange. Its use is primarily this: the buyer first exchanges some of his local currency for bitcoin; then they use that bitcoin to buy on the internet; then the seller takes the received bitcoin and exchanges it for her local currency. This is certain to correctly reflect the exchange rate between the buyer's and seller's currencies, because if it didn't there would be money to be easily made by looping some money through the FX (foreign exchange) and bitcoin routes. For this use of bitcoin as a medium of exchange, it doesn't matter what the current value of bitcoin is, as long as it doesn't go up or down too fast. And indeed we've seen big swings in the price of bitcoin, but usage has continued. 

Another example of a medium of exchange that is never held for long is a paper currency that is experiencing significant inflation. In this case, as with bitcoin, the value of the currency is dictated by the amount of use it is getting. For bitcoin, where there is limited production, the value can go either way, but since it depends on decisions by many people, it is inherently unpredictable. However some people keep a significant bitcoin holding, as if it was a store of value, and the existence of these stores means there is always a risk that the market will be flooded by people trying to cash them in.

Value

When the economy is functioning correctly, it continuously produces things of value at the highest possible rate, giving something close to full employment. The things of value that it produces are services. A car or a train provides transportation services. A house provides shelter and accommodation services. Owning a house provides a security of shelter service.

To produce services you need assets: houses, cars, people with skills and time, and much more. What services an economy can produce depends on what assets it has. What services an economy does produce depends on who has the economic power to decide. In a pure market economy that power is precisely money. In our society governments and banks have substantial additional power.

If value consists of services continuously produced, then what is a "store of value"? Non monetary stores of value are just assets that can be put to use producing services in the future (whether or not they are currently used): houses, machinery, stores of non-perishable raw materials, and much more. The relative value of these things changes, so the concept of a store of value is a fuzzy one. Can money be a store of value?

Gold acts as a form of money. It has industrial uses, but the amount of gold stored vastly exceeds any such requirements. Also the price of gold is artificially high because of all the storage. We have to deduce that gold only acts as a store of value because people expect that it will, and that expectation is no different from the previous expectation that cowrie shells would retain their value.

Suppose that, for some form of money, the value of the money (what it will buy) is steady or going up (deflation). Then people are inclined to save it for the proverbial rainy day. If the currency has limited production, such as gold or bitcoin, then the fact that money is being taken out of circulation means there is less money chasing the same amount of goods, so prices must fall. Which is the same as saying that the value of the currency is going up. This further increases the inclination of people to save because if you can defer a purchase you pay less. But the "rainy days" that people are saving for are not always uncorrelated. When a pandemic or a weather disaster comes along, then that money comes out chasing a supply of goods that can't quickly increase, causing instant inflation. We see that saving money is not the correct way for society as a whole to prepare for an emergency, and that money with limited supply can mislead people into thinking it is a store of value.

A real store of value must be linked to future production of services, because that is the real economy when you strip away the veneer of money. Later we'll consider how to do that.

Currencies

Currencies should be optimized for the role of being a medium of exchange. And indeed that is what modern Reserve Banks try to do, and largely succeed.

Though the currency is a medium of exchange, still the participants in the economy want to keep a buffer of money. They don't want to have to liquidate an asset whenever they need to buy something. But as we've seen, it is unhelpful if there is any incentive for people to hold large quantities of the currency, because then the authorities lose control of this vital part of the economy. The Reserve Banks have found that 2 to 3 percent inflation is ideal. People can hold plenty of currency for exchange purposes without significant loss, but everyone has a big incentive to buy or invest to avoid their wealth melting away over the longer term. So the money keeps going around at a moderately constant rate.

If there is excessive inflation then the Reserve Bank can soak up money by borrowing money (selling bonds) which raises the interest rate. This actually presents itself as raising the interest rate. Presumably it is easier to work out how to counteract a particular amount of inflation by specifying a particular interest rate and borrowing enough to hit that target.

If inflation is too low, or there is deflation then the Reserve Bank can counter that by lowering the interest rate by buying bonds to put more money into circulation. There are minor and major problems with this. A minor problem is that there may not be enough bonds to buy back, which has been solved by buying other organizations' bonds. The major problem is that if money isn't circulating, which is what happens in recessions, then adding more doesn't help much and makes the situation less stable. I should admit that I don't understand the detail of how Reserve Banks function, but I think this is close enough.

Using interest rates to control the economy is fundamentally wrong since it has random effects on many people who need to live off a risk free investment. Currently interest rates are close to zero, forcing Reserve Banks to move to what they call quantitative easing. Buying non-bank bonds gives wealthy debtors free money, aggravating the rising inequality in our society.

For a stable economic system we want the interest on safe investment to be fairly steady. Historically it looks like inflation plus 3 percent might be the right number. This allows people to save for retirement expecting that they can expand their capital at the rate of inflation and also have income to live off. To achieve this we need an alternative to low interest rates to inject money into the economy.

I propose that there be a "tax on low inflation". When there is deflation or low inflation, the Reserve Bank will create money and pay it to the tax office. The legislation for this tax will require that it be spent almost immediately, and that any that cannot be so spent should be sent immediately to the general population, as the Australian Labor government did in the GFC. 

Another way the government can spend the low inflation tax is to buy something from another country, as long as the money can be spent immediately. How does that work? The government buying foreign currency lowers the country's exchange rate. That makes it easier for local industry to sell for export. It also causes immediate inflation by raising the price of imported goods.

While the tax on low inflation will be a big improvement in normal times, it does leave the situation where a lot of money is in private hands and can, in certain circumstances, flood the economy.

A Value Store Currency

We increasingly deal with money through computer software. That makes it easy for us to deal with multiple currencies. We have seen the difficulty of a single currency being both a medium of exchange and a store of value. It is natural to ask if we can separate out a 2nd currency that is a store of value. I have a proposal.

Value is services, provided by assets. A store of value consists of assets that will contribute to providing services at some future time. But such assets have variable lifespans, and they vary in their relative value over time. What we want for our value-storing currency is for it to represent a right to part of a collection of assets, that is maintained in a way that preserves its value. Explicitly:

We'll call our value-store currency "doubloons". People can interchange doubloons and dollars at any time at the current rate. The intention is that the exchange rate changes will be identical to inflation (for some reasonable definition thereof), so that the purchasing power of doubloons will be constant.

The government keeps non perishable assets whose value matches that of the outstanding doubloons. When people cash in their doubloons, so that there are then less outstanding, then the government sells some assets to keep the store level correct. When people buy more doubloons, then the government uses the dollars it gets to expand the store.

When the value of the assets held rises faster than inflation, then the government can sell some and pocket the money. However if the value doesn't rise fast enough then the government commits to expanding the store using tax money.

The government has an obligation to keep stores of things to prepare for an emergency. PPE (personal protective equipment) and oil have been in the news lately. It is intended that this value-store be used for this purpose, though the government has to make up any costs from storing perishable items that need to be constantly refreshed (such as food). When an emergency does strike then the government should replace the assets it then needs with others.

The store should not be an arbitrary collection of assets, but rather cover a wide range in the right proportion, so that the country can continue to operate during periods when it is cut off from suppliers for any reason.

Since there are costs associated with supporting this, it is envisaged that it will be for citizens and local organizations only. All they are allowed to do is convert the currency to or fro. It still makes sense to have loans and other financial operations denominated in doubloons, but when the time comes to do the actual financial transfer it is actually done in dollars calculated at the current rate.

Foreign Currency Exchange

We see the breathless news item "there is a current account deficit/surplus". What does that mean? When there was fixed exchange rates then a current account deficit meant that more people wanted to sell the local currency than there were people who wanted to buy it. So the government was forced to sell its foreign currency or gold holding to preserve the fixed rate, and this couldn't continue indefinitely. It was an urgent situation. Eventually the government would be forced to reduce the price of the local currency, changing to a new fixed exchange rate. Investors who guessed this would happen made a fortune.

Now that we have floating exchange rates, running a current account deficit is neither positive nor negative. It has a different meaning. A current account deficit means that more goods and services are coming into the country than are going out. And yet the currency has an equal number of buyers and sellers. How can that be?

The answer is that the extra buyers of the local currency are buying things in the country which they then don't take out of the country. This might be real estate, or equity in a business or it might be a loan. So one way to look at it is that a current account deficit represents foreigners investing in the country. Another way is to say that there is net borrowing from overseas. There is no way to distinguish between these.

On the other side, a current account surplus sounds like a great thing, but it might just mean that foreigners are disinvesting in the country.

When countries share a currency, such as the European Euro, then that is taking fixed exchange rates to extremes, since countries don't have the option to modify their rate. This was a big problem in the Eurozone, with poorer countries teetering on bankruptcy. This is potentially a problem in federal countries like the USA and Australia, which have states with substantial economic independence. In those countries the solution is for the central government to arrange wealth transfer from richer to poorer states. It seems that the Eurozone has now recognised the need to do this, with the European Central Bank buying government bonds of the poorer states at low interest rates.

Reality versus Finance

When I was a kid in the mid-1950s, the milkman delivered milk to our door. With cream on top, but I digress. He just had to run between the vehicle and the doorsteps because the vehicle advanced by itself using natural intelligence. Yes it was horse drawn. Sixty five years later and artificial intelligence hasn't caught up. But by the 50s horses were already rare.

What caused the Great Depression of the 1930s? In our assets plus services economic model, what happens if you suddenly lose a lot of assets? Obviously the total ability of society to produce services is reduced. It is the job of government and the finance sector to figure out what to do about that to produce services at the rate needed for full employment.

The 1920s and 30s was a period of transition. People were moving from the country to the city. In the country they had tremendous skills for dealing with horses and other animals. Even in the city horse skills were very valuable. The move to mechanization threw those skills in the bin. At a moment in time when there was a tremendous need for new skills, the market was flooded with labour that was unskilled in the new context.

Governments could have handled this better. Yes it would have been good to get the unemployed people to work building infrastructure such as roads. Pouring money into the economy and blowing some huge asset bubbles would have helped, and that's what we would do today. But really the right answer was to identify the training needs and make that happen.

That would have been hard then, but maybe we can leverage the Internet to do it now. Which brings us to the next section.

Pandemic Economics

In the pandemic there are many services, recreational and optional, that are much less used. But there is also less employment so it balances out. Except that the unemployment is not evenly distributed. So the government is paying the unemployed in various ways. This maintains the consumption of essential services like food, so that essential services are not also reduced by lack of demand, as happened tragically in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

If we think about services, the first question is what extra services could be provided while restrictions are in place. Most of the people who are underemployed have skills that are not currently useful. So extra work would have to be relatively unskilled, and shovel-ready. This is hard, though it does seem that in Australia some unemployed people could be employed doing fuel reduction to reduce the impact of bushfires.

We can also try to prepare by considering what services will be wanted when the pandemic is under control. A lot of people will want a holiday, including people who usually go overseas but will now stay closer to home. A lot of people will be keen to save, having blown their savings, or because they are behind on their mortgage. This will create unemployment unless the government steps in with community wide services. There is plenty that needs to be done.

Most of all we need to give unemployed people the ability and incentive to learn new skills.

The Virus Problem

 The Virus Problem

I'm not a doctor or a biology expert. This is just based on my concept of common sense. For the purposes of this article, I will use "bacteria" to mean living things that don't try to get into cells, though there are others; and I will use "virus" for things that need to get into cells, though this also includes intracellular parasites such as malaria and toxoplama.

For bacteria the immune system has a problem because there are good and bad bacteria, and the body has to distinguish. However the good are only in special places like the skin and gut, and mostly when they are in the wrong place the answer is to attack and kill and that works well most of the time for most people.

Viruses get into cells, and that is much harder for the body to deal with. The body has a complicated system for dealing with viruses before they get into cells and that is great except that a lot can happen while it's getting its act together.

The problem is: what to do about infected cells. In the early stages the answer is to kill the cells and hope to make up for the damage later. But when too many cells are infected then that can be a bad plan, because losing too many of an important type of cell can kill you. Plan B is for the cell to shut the virus down as much as possible, and for the immune system to tone down the cell destruction to a manageable level. Viruses that are well adapted to humans seem to know to tone down their attack to not kill their host, since that is a bad career move for them.

Humans form a vast monoculture across the planet. Monocultures are extremely prone to disease. We are lucky to have the SARS-CoV2 virus as a wake-up call. We need to wake up and decide to attack all viruses, planet-wide. This means:

• Testing, particularly of people travelling. We are mostly looking for anything new, or known to be virulent. E.g. temperature checks are an easy test, and everyone with a temperature can be followed up. Sereological testing for antibodies is good, if it can be done easily, perhaps with a finger prick.
• Reporting. Let's get a continuous global view of the health of our monoculture.
• That will let us isolate and attack areas of infection.
• Aim high. We want the total elimination of viruses and other intracellular parasites.

An Internet Education Infrastructure

 An Internet Education Infrastructure

Australia has proved a popular destination for tertiary students to get University degrees. This has been good for the economy, but is not going to come back soon, and it may never come back. And yet what are people going to do during the coming period of high unemployment? Many will choose to improve their education. 

Meanwhile the Internet has developed into an important adjunct to education. Explicitly:

Youtube (and other video and podcasting and blogging services) provide a lot of brilliant educational material. Unfortunately they also provide an equal or greater amount of well presented false information. For educational purposes there is an urgent need for curation, and to free the material from providers who are subject to so much legal and commercial pressure from various bad actors.

Wikipedia (and other attempts to organize knowledge, such as nLab and kerodon), are a wonderful resource, but they are not oriented to education. For example if you want to understand a particular entry, it will have links to things that you also need to understand, but if you go to those links they are just as complex with just as many links, and not restricted to the level of understanding you need. For educational purposes subjects have prerequisites, and when we have links to material from the prerequisites then we want the exposition to be at the level of that prerequisite. Then, when you go down these rabbit holes, you must come to an end. That is because subjects and prerequisite subjects are organised in a tree structure, and things get simpler as you go down, and there is a limit to how simple you can get. Educational web pages might also have links to other parts of the same course but they will naturally be clearly marked as such.

Let's suppose we do the work, so that we have a wonderful curated collection of educational material, and we have a tree structured curriculum containing links to recommended educational material that covers the course. There are two more things we need for a working education system, which are, in reverse order:

• Evaluating, in a secure way, that students have acquired the knowledge and skills taught by the course, and providing widely accepted certification of that.

• Practising the demonstration of the acquired knowledge and skills and receiving feedback and help. 

There are extra problems when the skills to be demonstrated involve real-world interactions, and not just screens. Students will then be limited to particular places even for practice. There will already be a requirement for students to get to particular places for secure evaluation.

Every part of this looks doable. We will assume that we have a collaboration of government and semi-government organizations (such as universities). All the people involved are identified, not anonymous. Identification is naturally from authorization by one of the participating organizations.

Curation of Educational Resources

Some of the people in some of the organizations will be authorized to do curation. This will include all the people preparing courses and curriculums. Where copyright permits the items should be moved to a secure repository. Otherwise a cryptographic hash of the item should be taken so that it can't be changed while staying at the same URL.

The person adding an item indicates why. The main reason will be because it honestly presents the views of a significant number of experts in the field, preferably all of them. Another reason might be that it has historical interest of some sort. The educational level and clarity of presentation would also be assessed.

Curriculum and Course Construction

A curriculum describes the knowledge and skills for a particular subject area at a particular level, and how these should be assessed. It should come with something like a wikipedia entry, except that the links should always point to information in the prerequisites, or perhaps to information from earlier in that same course. This collection of web pages should actually be a very terse course for the curriculum.

A course for a curriculum is a set of curated resources that cover the curriculum, plus example assessments with examples of the successful completion of those assessments.

Assessment

It is envisaged that assessment will be separated from instruction. Instruction can be provided by independent training services. However institutions going to the trouble to produce curriculums and courses, will often be running the course for some students, and providing at least enough assessment for those students. 

Assessment should be secure. Students need to be biometrically identified and the circumstances need to prevent cheating. For example screen based testing should use the assessors screens and should be done in a faraday cage to prevent communication with the outside world.

Training

Separating training from assessment has been quite common. For this to work the curriculum and assessment have to be well defined. The payoff is innovation and flexibility in training. If people already know the subject then they only need to make sure they use the same terminology and notation to get certification.

Summary

A dynamic educational environment can raise productivity, and also make the world a lot safer for democracy when voters need to resist an avalanche of misinformation.

A Nuclear Future for Australia

An Open Letter to CSIRO

The world is on the brink of momentous change. At the same time, the Australian government needs to give the voters a positive message about the future. It is natural for CSIRO to lead at this time.

Nuclear power is going to deliver the cheap, carbon-free high intensity energy that will shape the 21st century. We don't know which SMR (small modular reactor) technology will win, but it is clear that several are close to deployment and there is enormous scope for technological progress. Morrison explicitly said they were not ruling out nuclear. With Indonesia, and many other neighboring countries, going nuclear, there is little doubt we will follow. Leading environmentalists believe it is an essential technology to combat climate change while maintaining and increasing our standard of living.

When I was at CSIRO the public was very anti-nuclear, and we were pleased to escape being united with ANSTO. That is now rapidly changing, and CSIRO will be left behind if it doesn't endorse and support nuclear energy. Deploying and taking full advantage of nuclear power is a multidisciplinary job, so union with ANSTO is now a good step.

The public is ready to hear about the need for disaster preparation. A recurring world-wide disaster is a large volcano erupting, sometimes for years, and significantly reducing sunlight, leading to agriculture failures. This happens every few hundred years on average, the most recent being Mount Tambora in 1815. This is, incidentally, an argument for nuclear power compared to solar. More significantly it is an argument for vertical farming using artificial light, which cheap nuclear power will make affordable. Vertical farming eliminates the need for chemicals, such as insecticides, which have damaged the natural environment. It can benefit from optimal levels of CO2 and just the light frequencies the plants use. Vertical farming is usually shown going up, but it can as easily go down out of sight. Allowing cities to be self-sufficient in basic food production and water purification will strengthen their ability to cope with many sorts of disaster.

Small reactors are also a natural way to power large ships, giving fast, quiet, cheap, and carbon-free shipping. This has the potential to connect Australia to the world, so that we are less reliant on trade with nearby economies such as China. I don't know whether it is practicable for Australia to be involved in manufacturing on that scale, but cheap power plus robot technology seems to open up the possibility.

A look at the map shows that Australia is lacking cities in its North-West. For a truly ambitious project we should build a city there that sits lightly on the land, producing its own water and most of its food, safely destroying its waste and producing no air pollution. I like to think the Aboriginal people will be supportive of this, because it is the blueprint for a world where we can return significant amounts of land to their care.

Further in the future, but clearly in view, is the advance in space technology. While most are thinking about the Moon and Mars, the smart money is on asteroids beyond the frost line, and avoiding deep gravity wells. While this is further in the future, there is an obvious connection to perfecting vertical farming and water purification using nuclear energy

It is in times like these that governments and voters are primed to accept a significant change in direction. Seize the moment.