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Tuesday 3 April 2012

Breath burial


From Click Green we are told:-

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council(EPSRC) and the Department of Energy and Climate Change(DECC) today announced a £13 million investment to establish a UK Carbon Capture and Storage(CCS) Research Centre.

I suppose £13 million is a merely a drop in the ocean of waste, yet it is comparable in scale to spending by the Children's Brain Tumour Research Centre. Worth dwelling on that one I think.

But burying CO2 is beyond parody, beyond stupid, beyond mere funding greed and the infinitely tedious grinding monster of a stupidity machine tended with fanatical devotion by the mad and the bad.

This is a symptom of insanity. The insane are defined by their behaviour, by the way they deviate from rational norms clearly visible to all but the afflicted . One is inevitably reminded of Swift's The Grand Academy of Lagado. Although burying CO2, which after all is much the same as burying our own breath - well that has to be a little more outré than trying to extract sunbeams from cucumbers.

4 comments:

Macheath said...

I have to profess ignorance of the technicalities here but how do they plan to cope with seismic activity?

I have a horrible feeling we are seeing writ large a phenomenon that has caused untold havoc in the field of education, among others; strategic decisions are in the hands of people with no practical experience transferred in because their mastery of jargon and management-speak has impressed selection boards.

By their nature, these people are biased towards showy projects and headline-grabbing initiatives, regardless of cost or practicality.

A K Haart said...

M - I think you are right. These are vanity projects and the only real criteria are imagined kudos and whether or not the money can be screwed out of some budget or other.

James Higham said...

The mania, the tenacity to push this no matter what, no matter what science says, no matter what common sense says, might suggest to you stupidity and I'm not disagreeing. It also suggests to me an agenda.

A K Haart said...

James - yes there is an agenda. It relies on stupidity, but behind the stupidity there is a heap of money.