Ed Dowding

Anyone who studied a little genetics in high school has heard of adenine, thymine, guanine and cytosine – the A,T,G and C that make up the DNA code. But those are not the whole story. The rise of epigenetics in the past decade has drawn attention to a fifth nucleotide, [...]. And now there’s a sixth. [...]

[This] suggests that a new layer of complexity exists between our basic genetic blueprints and the creatures that grow out of them. “This is another mechanism for regulation of gene expression and nuclear structure that no one has had any insight into,” says Heintz, who is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. “The results are discrete and crystalline and clear; there is no uncertainty. I think this finding will electrify the field of epigenetics.”

Genes alone cannot explain the vast differences in complexity among worms, mice, monkeys and humans, all of which have roughly the same amount of genetic material. Scientists have found that these differences arise in part from the dynamic regulation of gene expression rather than the genes themselves. Epigenetics, a relatively young and very hot field in biology, is the study of nongenetic factors that manage this regulation.

Source: EurekAlert, via @azeem

This is why I’ll go to prison (oh the irony) before I allow myself to be on a DNA database.

(EDIT 19 Apr 09: I realised I had more to write and have pulled information out into this post for greater clarity: Reasons not to be on a DNA database.)

There are many, many arguments against genetic databases, and very few reasonable ones for.

If we have genetic databases at all, they should be

1. run by a transparent organisation, independent of government
2. only collect information from those convicted of crimes
3. never collect samples from minors
4. only used for security and justice
5. routinely protected with multi-tier anonymity
6. only permitting named access at the end of a regulated judicial process

How the EU is involved

(Updated: Sunday 19th April 2009 — I forgot to include all the EU bits.. whoops!)

It is in situations like this, where one’s own government is being spineless and settling at an unnecessarily draconian point on the liberty <–> security continuum, that the supra-national EU becomes really rather useful. After a celebrated petition by 2 British men,

the European court of human rights in Strasbourg said that keeping innocent people’s DNA records on a criminal register breached article eight of the Human Rights Convention, covering the right to respect for private and family life.

Guardian, 4 Dec 08

It has been 4 months since that ruling, and the illegal data, which is to say that of people like you who have never been convicted of a crime, still has not been removed.

It is a odd and disappointing that the same EU has insisted that fingerprints be stored on our passports in future, but this is a far less bitter pill to swallow, and with far more moderate side effects.

Even though the Americans are stepping up their database drive, a move towards a biometric state and all its sinister implications is not inevitable. The inevitable is only that which we fail to avoid.

Biometric security and surveillance is essentially an arms race, which raises the stakes for all of us. It erodes our liberty, freedom of movement, freedom of protest, right to privacy, and right to security. The small amount of crime we have does not justify gambling these hard fought for rights.

We are at one of those moments in history when the challenges are international and the only means of dealing with them is at least on a regional level. [...] [R]egions can and must supply the answers to all sorts of issues from the environment to the economy. If the world is to recover, then it needs a Europe which acts and is a single market.

Britain can [encourage a multi-speed Europe] if it likes. There are endless opportunities and Sarkozy is there ready to join with us in exploiting them. But it is also true that the country cannot afford the Union to collapse under the weight of this recession. Nor can it be in our interest to join an alliance of the big against the small when we have so much interest in allying with them on most issues.

All of a sudden Europe has become an interesting place, although you won’t have any reflection of that when voters come to choose their European candidate in June.

Source: Adrian Hamilton, writing in The Independent

If I’ve understood the point clearly, this seems to propose that we can not have a multiple speed EU AND a single market without making the recession worse, or ruthlessly exploiting our neighbours to save our own skins.

I do not see why this has to be the case. Europe is not just about the finance and trade. A multi-speed Europe would cover all sorts of agreements, such as labour movement and migration, research contributions, transport harmonisation, energy and environmental policy, and security and public health cooperation, to name but a few.

IF we want it, we can have a loosely bound EU which acknowledges that its members are unlikely to ever be in the same place heading in the same direction on all things. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: it is the diversity of Europe which gives it the strength and adaptability to create synergy in the regional solutions for the international problems, and that if we make the EU work well, she will work for us all.

The good news for Britain’s energy supply is that the sheer scale of the recession has cut our electricity demand and carbon emissions. An impending energy security crunch has been postponed.The bad news is that the recession will almost certainly delay investment in Britain’s energy infrastructure and encourage complacency.

[...]

For the past two decades we have had ample reserves to absorb the shocks: now the margins are beginning to wear thin. Many of the existing power stations were built in the 1970s or earlier. All the coal-fired stations are more than 30 years old, as are most of the nuclear ones. They are all coming to the end of their lives and their reliability is inevitably beginning to suffer.

[...]

Time is now very short in energy terms. Investment does not fit into neat electoral cycles. With about five years to go if the economy recovers, there are still things that can be done. Our energy policy was designed for the years of energy surpluses and North Sea gas. It is still focused on keeping costs down and sweating assets. What is needed is a radical rethink, with investment the priority. It will take a national effort to prevent a serious crisis in the middle of the next decade.

Without such a redesign, if there is a rapid economic recovery, things could get nasty quite quickly. As energy systems operate closer to the margin, small shocks have large consequences. Today a few demonstrators cannot make any serious impact, and even a prolonged interruption in Russian gas supply can be withstood. But as margins tighten, prices respond disproportionately. Britain has probably already committed itself to higher and more volatile prices.

Dieter Helm, Professor of Energy Policy at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of New College, writing in The Times.

“I discovered a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works. ”
Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve, 23 October 2008

I do love that quote. It’s to brilliantly demonstrative of the problem: “I thought the world worked like this. I was just doing what I’ve always known and thought, but it turns out that the world has changed and my view of it has not.”

So it is nice to be reminded of it in the opening pages of the NEF’s new book, ‘From the Ashes of the Crash‘ (you can download it free).

They supply 20 steps we can take to a stronger economy. I’ve added some more information to the ideas I particularly like.

1. Demerge banks that are ‘too big to fail’
2. Segregate financial markets
3. Bring onto the balance sheet, rigorously check and officially license all ‘exotic’ financial instruments
4. Create a secure, accessible local banking system
5. Enhance economic support for the local economy
6. Encourage the introduction of complementary, multilevel currencies
7. Create new public money
8. Introduce a ‘People’s Pension’
9. Enable ‘local bonds’ as a secure investment vehicle
   These could include local authority green bonds, green gilts and green family savings bonds and publicly approved enterprises, all of which could help deliver the mass transition to a cleaner more environmentally sustainable Britain on a path of low-carbon economic transition, whilst creating more secure vehicles for savings. These investments would also stimulate productive local economic activity, and yield rich rewards through job creation.
10. Introduce a moratorium on crash-related home evictions and rebuild the UK’s stock of social housing
11. Take a ‘social investment approach’ to public services
    Recent nef research found that for every £1 spent on alternatives to prison that reduce reoffending, an additional £14 worth of social value
    is generated. Also, when we value the long-term benefi ts of sound relationships and stable homes for children in care, we could see returns of up to £6. These savings over 20 years could pay for the entire annual care bill each year. If measured properly, investment in public services can have returns that demonstrate their ‘worth’. While they may not yield immediate fi nancial returns, they can nonetheless generate substantial social value.
12. Tap into the hidden value of time banking and grow the ‘core economy’
13. Improve checks and balances by introducing capital controls
14. Make taxation work
    As an organising principle, we should also move towards taxing more what we want less of, such as pollution and unsustainable consumption of natural resources, and taxing less what we want more of, such as those activities needed for the environmental transformation of the economy. This transition should be managed not only to just protect the poor, but so that it reduces inequality.
15. Increase stability and raise resources with currency and financial transaction taxes
16. Launch a Green New Deal to fight the recession whilst tackling energy insecurity and climate change
17. Pay for energy transition and fuel poverty with a windfall tax
18. Hold accountancy firms accountable
19. Introduce a maximum pay differential, or maximum wage
20. Take a ‘five-a-day’ approach to well-being to help beat the negative psychological effects of recession and build resilience

The irony is, of course, that we used to have much of this, and we sacrificed it all at the alter of ‘efficiency’. We knew at the time that we were losing something, but I think most just put it down to a sentimentality for the old ways of doing things. What we lost was slack in the system. We tightened every process so much and that a big impact at one end was felt just as strongly all the way through the rest of the connected economy.

But in a way, we’ve had it easy with this financial crash. Food is still on the shelves, petrol in the pumps … life goes on pretty much as normal for most people. There are quite a few jobs lost, of course, and people feel pretty miserable much of the time, but at the end of the day we’re still warm, fed, and alive.

So it is interesting to think about how we manage the production chain which keeps us supplied with our basic needs. Remember when Russia recently cut off the gas? We only have about 15 days of gas supplies stored in the UK (and 80 days of oil and 90 days of coal). Think about how many other parts of our daily life have been pared to the bone… I’m not suggesting we stock up on tins and guns just yet (though actually a well stocked larder is always a good thing), but I would urge you to consider the wisdom of  ‘just in time‘ logistics.

There are a lot of curious inefficiencies in modern life. We end up owning an awful lot of things which we don’t use very much, but we have them because when we want when we really want them. Lawnmowers, tools for small jobs around the house, washing machines, and cars are just a few things which would suggest that we could be a little bit smarter in the way we handle things. I mean, it’s 2009, we know we have ever more people yet finite resources, and we know climate change is real, right? We really owe it to ourselves to sort out a few things and demonstrate that we’re as smart as we think we are.

So even if you can think of a better way to do things, how do you get those ideas adopted? The world is already very geared up to working in the way it does, so solutions have to address the following:

1. contribute to the economy
2. provide people with incomes and things to do
3. we just like getting new things
4. we like them to be ours
5. we like the convenience of having things where we want them, when we want them.

The one thing which is almost guaranteed to create change in everyone is saving money. As our own experience, Nudge, and innumerable other books tell us, we feel the pain of giving things away much more than we feel the joy of getting new things, so this is a great place to start. So what simple things can we do to create the biggest savings for people? What hits our wallets hardest? Cars.

Car clubs

You’ll probably already have heard of ZipCar (and many other similar companies) who supply a variety of cars at convenient locations for use whenever you want for as long as you want. They are considerably cheaper to run than having your own car, and require no maintenance. We can choose a new car every time (big one, smart one, easy to park one) so we always get the newness, and we have a sense of possession (though not complete) since we’re part of a club. And whilst there are some inconveniences such as perhaps having to walk a little further to the allocated parking spot, these are all outweighed by the convenience of not having to tax it, insure it, maintain it, or pay any upfront costs for it. From an environmental perspective it’s great since every zipcar means 15-20 fewer private vehicles on the road.

Does it work, though? Is there adoption? Does it deliver the benefits? Is it creating the change? Yes. It took 2 years to get the first 1,000 Zipcar members. Today it takes a few days. I’d say that’s pretty successful.

You may also like to see what the founder is working on now.

Car sharing

There are organisations like Car Share, FreeWheelers, GoLoco, etc which all help promote more optimal car use, but there are lots of drawbacks to this idea. It certainly has a role to play, especially in smaller communities, but does not address some of our key wants.

Completely new vehicles

I’m basically talking about the GM / Segaway PUMA here. This travels at a max speed of 35 mph and doesn’t have a lot of storage space but does provide shelter and convenience, and reduces urban traffic density. However a bike is also very good at this, at a fraction of the cost.

Electric cars

Whilst I personally prefer the idea of car clubs, it seems that these are going provide the largest part of the solution for zero-carbon personal transport, since they satisfy the things listed at the start, and are a minimal departure from the way things are at the moment.

Electric cars have the advantage that the energy source is interchangeable. It could be nuclear, coal, solar, wind, or any one of the sources of the huge amounts of renewable energy available to us today.

The market is innovating reasonably well. Tesla (no bailout) has developed two cars on less than $200 million — compared to the $1 billion General Motors (various bailouts and still going down) spent developing the now-deceased EV1. However there is still a long way to go with battery technology to make it really amazing….

… or is there?

Electric car networks

A few months ago I was told about Better Place. Their thinking is that if you have the network to support electric cars, ie charging points where you park, and refill points along the road, then actually battery life is not such a problem. Laptop owners will be able to relate to this, I’m sure.

If you have 20 minutes, I’d recommend this brilliant video by the founder which does a great job of showing what they’re doing, how, with who’s support, and why.

They are getting things done incredibly quickly. They’re about 5 years ahead of where I had thought them to be. Their  fervour and success is testament to the size of their mission. They are literally trying to save the world, and the way their going they have a good shot at it.

It is the kind of leadership, innovation, and confrontation of the facts shown by all those listed here that is going to create the world we should have.

Where Europe can help

I think we can all agree that the less we get involved in these companies and what they do, the better. They’re clearly innovating and creating very nicely.

There are areas where governments and the EU can, and should, help make things easier.

1. Compel industry standards, as they’ve done on mobile phone chargers, so that we can get on and build the networks and vehicles quickly and efficiently, and with as many low-cost and upgradable components as possible.
2. Support investment in the infrastructure. (See this blog post for information on the sunk cost of the bailouts vs the costs of an electric car network.)
3. Invest in research and innovation