December 8, 2018

Attenborough’s plea, a Chrismas bonus, church tech and more: best of the week’s news

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Tim Fryer, technology editor

Attenborough issues stark climate change warning to world leaders

I doubt I’ll be the only one who picks up on this story this week, and there are also a number of related articles on the E&T website about power and efficiency as this issue increasingly finds itself in the limelight. This one catches the eye because it’s the adored Sir David delivering the message on a platform that should ensure it’s heard throughout the land – every land.

As pointed out in this report, certain parts of the world have gone off the boil with regard to environmental responsibility, with short-term political expediency and a head-in-the-sand attitude conveniently combining to diminish the issue. Hopefully what will emerge from COP24 in Katowice this week will be some useful information on how countries are expected to meet the tough carbon-emission targets set in the 2015 Paris agreement, and armed with that will be the will to make them work.

It’s that last part that is difficult. Sure, countries would like to fulfil their international obligations on all sorts of things, especially issues as important as this, but you only need to look at the shambles in Westminster at the moment to realise that the bigger picture stuff is so often shifted to the back burner that it occupies a permanent place there. Admittedly Brexit is fairly big picture and it also entails all the self-serving power games to be played out among MPs – there aren’t really the same political machinations associated with climate change. So my point is that we can’t trust this biggest of all issues with country leaders – if it’s going to be big it needs to start small.

I was at a meeting this week with Japanese company Yokogawa, who gave an informal presentation about the importance of working for the next generation. This means being sustainable so that those who come after us will be able to thrive and prosper. The interesting thing is, for all that any company needs to make money, if it starts to actually deliver on an environmental agenda it starts to suck in its supply chain and customer base accordingly. This is particularly true of engineering and technology companies that lead innovation and determine energy use.

Most companies do of course have their sustainability mission statements, many of which can be copy-and-pasted from one organisation to the next. But if a company truly has an environmental epiphany, typically championed by the top dog, then change really can happen. We all know companies now have more global control than national governments do, and as we can’t trust our politicians to really take climate change seriously, could it be time for global corporations to step up to the plate? It’s unlikely of course, but clearly the likes of Warren Buffet and Bill Gates decided they ‘couldn’t take it with them’ and that money wasn’t everything, so maybe there is hope. Probably a better bet than relying on our politicians, anyway.

Dickon Ross, editor in chief

Done your Christmas shopping yet? Here’s some ideas, both good and not so good

Have you done your shopping yet? E&T’s special digital bonus edition out this week is published we hope in time to provide some ideas for gifts and ways to celebrate as well as provide you with some entertainment over Christmas. There’s the top ten gadgets for you and the top toys for the budding engineer or technologist in your life. Civil engineers turn their skills from skyscrapers to the tallest gingerbread houses. We look at seven ways you can have a more plastic-free Christmas, and how AI could help alleviate the worst of the traffic in the great Christmas getaway. And we look towards the year ahead with the top technology trends according to our diverse panel of experts. IET members can download and unwrap the issue for free from within the app available from iTunes or Google Play. Everyone can read my introduction online or go straight to our online features. Happy Christmas all.

Rebecca Northfield, assistant features editor

How to build a gingerbread house – or an entire gingerbread city

Don’t mind me while I just go ahead and start eating it.

If an army of people can build a gingerbread city, then I’m sure I can find me an army of festive biscuit eaters. So there’s a bunch of confectionery engineers who are able to construct towering biscuit buildings with icing and some precise mathematics. And the higher you build, the stronger the biscuit base you need.

WSP’s gingerbread competition gets entries from structural engineers with a knack for baking. And you have to be really meticulous, just like when you build the real, concrete and steel thing. A big difference is you have to trim the material when it’s still warm. And you can eat it. Sure, you could eat metal, but do you really want to?

Everything is bonded together by royal icing – a critical bonding agent, and you tend to get creative to make sure everything stays together until the icing becomes hard. The bloke interviewed used bootlaces. Not sure whether that’s sugar laces, or actual shoelaces. Puzzling.

Anyway, I will be sticking to my traditional, small – but just as difficult for us usual people – gingerbread house.

Jonathan Wilson, online managing editor

Can you have a plastic-free Christmas?

Can you? Will you? You should – we all should. At least we should try. It’s fiendishly difficult to live a life entirely free of plastic, but as this article shows it’s getting easier to cut out a lot of the unnecessary use and waste.

Martin Hartley, polar photographer: ‘We’re on the brink and once we go over the edge we’ll never come back’

It’s good to hear from people every now and again who have devoted their lives to the study of one particular aspect of our natural world. They really know what’s going on out there, as they’ve spent years immersed in observation. Nothing beats experience, and in this interview polar photographer Martin Hartley shares some troubling thoughts about the declining health of the Earth’s two Poles.

AI and the great Christmas getaway!

As someone who travels a lot, due to the demands of work and personal life, I welcome any technological solutions to overcoming the problem of getting around more efficiently and less stressfully on this crowded island.

Dominic Lenton, managing editor

Colossus engineer’s tools on display 75 years after code-breaking computer’s birth

If you’re looking for something to do in the Milton Keynes area over Christmas you could always book to see Shane Richie treading the boards as Robin Hood in the local pantomime. That’ll keep a family entertained for a couple of hours, but how about a trip to Bletchley Park taking in the National Museum of Computing, which can occupy a whole day (and might just be a bit more informative). OK, you might have to work to persuade children that exhibits like this 1940s toolkit are up there with yelling ‘Behind you!’ at a member of the Eastenders cast, but based on my own experience the outing’s likely to make a more lasting impression.

Of course, there’s much more on display at the museum than just this, and kids accustomed to the sophistication of today’s computing are likely to be genuinely dumbfounded by the sheer scale of early machines like Colossus and its descendants. I was pleasantly surprised to learn this week that the IT curriculum for seven-year-olds includes things like getting their heads around the concept of ‘the Cloud’, something that many adults would struggle to put into words. Seeing how we’ve got to there from valve-powered structures the size of a room in less than 80 years can only help them tackle that kind of challenge at school.

Actually, I do like a good panto, so on behalf of soap starts past and present around the country, I should probably point out that the school holidays are long enough to go somewhere like Bletchley Park and to the theatre too.

Book interview: Michael Palin’s ‘HMS Erebus – The Story of a Ship’

I’m a big fan of author Dan Simmons, and particularly his novel ‘The Terror’, which is a fictional account of William Franklin’s ill-fated attempt to find the north-west passage that’s been televised this year. Fortunately – because few TV or movie versions of my favourite books have lived up to my expectations – it was on one of the channels that I don’t have access to, so I’ll have to reserve judgement. I did notice when in a supermarket this week though that Michael Palin’s take on the story of Franklin’s ship HMS Erebus is one of those big sellers fortunate enough to constitute the limited selection of books you can buy while doing your weekly grocery shopping. Nick Smith managed to interview Palin about the book and you can find a bit of background on how he came to write it here.

Vitali Vitaliev, features editor

Church worshippers use app to live vote for hymns and prayers

The Church, like everything else in the 21st century, has to keep abreast of the latest technology developments, so this story comes as no surprise.

These days, even the traditionally ultra-conservative Mount Athos – a semi-independent republic in the North of Greece – is resplendent with PCs and iPhones, as I had a chance to discover during my last visit there. Each sizeable monastery has its own website or several – a huge difference from 1993, when during my very first visit to the Holy Mountain I saw how the very first personal computers were delivered by mules to the remote skites (small monasteries) along the narrow and precarious mountain paths.

On my most recent visit, I was amazed to spot a row of solar panels stare up at the sky outside the walls of Great Lavra, Mouth Athos’s main monastery. Against the backdrop of the medieval monastery walls, the panels appeared alien and out of place – like bikini-clad models at a black-tie dinner – and I felt like pinching myself to make sure I was indeed in Mouth Athos, notorious for its stubborn resistance to any whiff of modernity.

It was no less amazing to observe the sudden technological transformation in the place compared with just 15 years earlier, when there was hardly any heating, the electricity supply was both erratic and sporadic, and public transportation was limited to a fleet of reliable and low-maintenance mules and only one car – an ancient Unimog truck, driven by the legendary Father Makarios – a chain-smoking monk wearing greasy jeans under his grimy habit. Reeking of rakia and cheap Karelia cigarettes, Father Makarios was then Mount Athos’s only driver, and his vehicle, with the character of a mule, carried Virgin Mary icons instead of pin-up girls on the windscreen, and a shotgun on the passenger seat – to blast the occasional unwary snake luxuriating on the track. There were no proper roads, just holes and bumps, and I remember bouncing in the tarpaulin-covered back of Father Makarios’s Unimog like a ping-pong ball inside an empty lunch box.

This time, to my huge surprise, cars and mini-buses were waiting for our ferry at Dafni, the Holy Mountain’s tiny port of entry. I noticed that some disembarking monks were carrying crates with herbs, fruit and veggies – another novelty: 15 years earlier all the monasteries and skites (no matter how small) were trying to be entirely self-sufficient.

Inside some monasteries, I could hear mobile phones ringing with peculiar Orthodox chant-like or prayer ringtones. A monk would then ferret the gadget out from underneath his loose black robes like some circus trickster, and, having finished the conversation, would drop it back – almost imperceptibly – into the seemingly bottomless dark recesses of his clothing. That was a significant change for the place where the first public phone cabin was installed as recently as in 1995, causing a heated debate and controversy comparable to the introduction of steam power in early 19th-century Europe.

And whereas the traditionalists keep insisting that religion in general and monasticism in particular should avoid technological progress, I tend to disagree. The fact that – in line with the Holy Mountain’s ongoing modernisation – the call for prayer was simultaneously broadcast on the monastery’s radio system did not make the divine liturgy itself less meaningful and less spiritual. At least not for me.

Mark Ballard, associate editor

Attenborough issues stark climate change warning to world leaders

UK government injects £60m into sustainable packaging scheme

42 per cent of coal power stations found to be running at a loss

Shell pledges reduce carbon emissions by 50 per cent by 2050

There has been talk that the troubles over France’s fuel tax this last few weeks were not a protest but the start of an insurrection. France’s President Emmanuel Macron had reckoned on averting ecological peril by tinkering with the market, with a bit of elbow economics. Taxes would discourage driving. Severe taxes would stress how much was at stake. But the combined crisis of common hardship and ecological collapse is so momentous that it will require greater imagination and ambition, and perhaps a greater degree of government intervention than a mere tax.

The papers reported lives of hardship in rural France, where common wages didn’t stretch the week, let alone the holidays. Leave it to market forces, as Macron’s philosophical position would appear to have it, and wealthy people will sell their cars and buy electric ones. The poor meanwhile will just sell their cars, unable to afford to run them. In rural France, in fact, they have been abandoning them to the arsonists. In a generation the trend would have trickled down, though not as quickly as civilisation’s odds.

Yet the idea is that the world’s problems are so complex and changeable that sensible solutions cannot be dictated. And that human dignity and free will are so precious, and human ingenuity so effective, and so beautiful, that people should not be told. So let people play free, it goes. Don’t discourage them from fulfilling their lives heartily, by taxing the wealth that comes from good living and good fortune. Tax what’s bad. Let people enjoy.

Macron would avert crisis as the conductor of a free jazz carnival parade, leaving everyone to make their own tune, so from the chaos will emerge such a beautiful cacophony of keys and melodies as could not be described on musical paper. Tinker with road signs, to send the carnival down a path, then leave it on its way.

This almost entirely worked with the 5p tax on plastic bags in the UK. It almost entirely worked with stiff subsidies for offshore wind, after two decades. It might work with the UK’s latest, relatively meagre incentive for businesses to innovate solutions to the problem of plastic waste. And what wonders of invention might incentive create if the government would only commit enough of it. The Newport Tidal Lagoon Power project would surely have inspired us all to abandon our cars if the government had simply put up the money.

Ecological figurehead David Attenborough has meanwhile declared before the UN that the ecological crisis is so severe that, if we don’t take action, “the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon”.

Yet the £1bn-a-year the UK puts up for wind farms was covered by increases in household bills. The tax to pay for government incentive has got to come from somewhere. Macron seems to have made big decisions. He will have shut down all coal power plants in two years. That’s the sort of business Attenborough means. In Northern France though, outlets of the posh chocolatier that is the family business of Macron’s wife Jean Trogneux were spat on and abused in the recent protests. You don’t know what hardship’s like, the sputum said; pile the burdens on people with shoulders big enough to take it; we want to eat cake too but we can’t afford it.

The pampered people of France have grown so used to generous social payouts that they don’t think it fair that the weather has turned against them, and that the time has come for them to knuckle down, to muck in and make the best of what there is. France has been so generous that double-digit unemployment is the norm. It has been so easy that the high-wage unemployed have been known to swan off for the high life abroad for years at a time, living off regular social payments and spouting off about fine art, superior food and liberty. Still, the hardships of the working poor are real.

In the US at least, they have been saying this is not a crisis of government but of capitalism. They ask what happened to the philanthropic spirit of post-war capitalists: the generous common wage, the insignificant degree of income inequality, the public-spirit. The world is supposedly awash with private finance. It is easy to get investment at low rates. There is presumably enough private money for lagoons aplenty, and to solve the problem of plastic and of fossil fuels. You would think it not fair until you saw the immense amount of investment, entrepreneurialism, and big industry that has taken to the problem of electric power, all around the world. The problem isn’t solved. It is being solved. With public spirit, it will be solved.