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Would someone give me a job developing ideas for the future. Here's another one I prepared earlier:

It seems that the transmission loss problem is a little less daunting using High Voltage Direct Current - I work out that southern Morocco to London would involve about a 7% transmission loss in a more or less straight line over land. Sounds like it has potential to me.

Now that Bloggers for Burma Day is past, my attention has been drawn to an article written thirty five years ago by Milton Friedman as then President Nixon was preparing to step up the "war on drugs". I think it appropriate today as President Brown prepares also to step up the "war on drugs" here at home (at the same time as the Czech Republic apparently starts the process of decriminalizing). You'll find it, which I reproduce in full below, along with lots of other useful documents and research hosted at the Schaffer Library of Drugs Policy:

Prohibition and Drugs

by Milton Friedman

From Newsweek, May 1, 1972

Stop Cannabis Prohibition
Originally uploaded by Professional Recreationalist

"The reign of tears is over. The slums will soon be only a memory. We will turn our prisons into factories and our jails into storehouses and com-cribs. Men will walk upright now, women will smile, and the children will laugh. Hell will be forever for rent."

That is how Billy Sunday, the noted evangelist and leading crusader against Demon Rum, greeted the onset of Prohibition in early 1920. We know now how tragically his hopes were doomed. New prisons and jails had to be built to house the criminals spawned by converting the drinking of spirits into a crime against the state. Prohibition undermined respect for the law, corrupted the minions of the law, created a decadent moral climate-but did not stop the consumption of alcohol.

Despite this tragic object lesson, we seem bent on repeating precisely the same mistake in the handling of drugs.

ETHICS AND EXPEDIENCY

On ethical grounds, do we have the right to use the machinery of government to prevent an individual from becoming an alcoholic or a drug addict? For children, almost everyone would answer at least a qualified yes. But for responsible adults, I, for one, Would answer no. Reason with the potential addict, yes. Tell him the consequences, yes. Pray for and with him, yes. But I believe that we have no right to use force, directly or indirectly, to prevent a fellow man from committing suicide, let alone from drinking alcohol or taking drugs.

I readily grant that the ethical issue is difficult and that men of goodwill may well disagree. Fortunately, we need not resolve the ethical issue to agree on policy. Prohibition is an attempted cure that makes matters worse-for both the addict and the rest of us. Hence, even if you regard present policy toward drugs as ethically justified, considerations of expediency make that policy most unwise.

Consider first the addict. Legalizing drugs might increase the number of addicts, but it is not clear that it would. Forbidden fruit is attractive, particularly to the young. More important, many drug addicts are deliberately made by pushers, who give likely prospects their first few doses free. It pays the pusher to do so because, once hooked, the addict is a captive customer. If drugs were legally available, any possible profit from such inhumane activity would disappear, since the addict could buy from the cheapest source.

Whatever happens to the number of addicts, the individual addict would clearly be far better off if drugs were legal. Today, drugs are both incredibly expensive and highly uncertain in quality. Addicts are driven to associate with criminals to get the drugs, become criminals themselves to finance the habit, and risk constant danger of death and disease.

Consider next the rest of us. Here the situation is crystal clear. The harm to us from the addiction of others arises almost wholly from the fact that drugs are illegal. A recent committee of the American Bar Association estimated that addicts commit one-third to one-half of all street crime in the U.S. Legalize drugs, and street crime would drop dramatically. Moreover, addicts and pushers are not the only ones corrupted. Immense sums are at stake. It is inevitable that some relatively low-paid police and other government officials-and some high-paid ones as well-will succumb to the temptation to pick up easy money.

LAW AND ORDER

Legalizing drugs would simultaneously reduce the amount of crime and raise the quality of law enforcement. Can you conceive of any other measure that would accomplish so much to promote law and order?

But, you may say, must we accept defeat? Why not simply end the drug traffic? That is where experience under Prohibition is most relevant. We cannot end the drug traffic. We may be able to cut off opium from Turkey but there are innumerable other places where the opium poppy grows. With French cooperation, we may be able to make Marseilles an unhealthy place to manufacture heroin but there are innumerable other places where the simple manufacturing operations involved can be carried out. So long as large sums of money are involved-and they are bound to be if drugs are illegal-it is literally hopeless to expect to end the traffic or even to reduce seriously its scope. In drugs, as in other areas, persuasion and example are likely to be far more effective than the use of force to shape others in our image.

As a side observation, the self same predictions as Milton makes here, 35 years ago, have been repeated just this week as Trading Standards officials fear the recent increase in the age at which youngsters can buy tobacco products will lead, as it will inevitably, to rogue traders flogging them fake fags over the school fence to get round the law. As the Schaffer library presents in a different article, the banning of something that is itself addictive is fraught with so many dangers as to make it nigh on impossible and certainly counter-productive. For those of us who already understand this, it's like watching a horrific train crash happening in slow motion knowing you are unable to prevent it.

In The poor and the dispossessed Simon Mollan on Inner West writes about an horrific scenario in which an underclass in Britain is trapped in a downward spiral of "violence, poverty, food insecurity, substance abuse, anger..." and so on and wonders whether there are any possible solutions.

I have to say I wrote an essay not too dissimilar to that at school. My teacher gave me nineteen out of twenty but wrote in his comments that it was "worse than Hitler". It took me many years to work out what he meant. And I only became aware really a couple of years ago. He was condemning me for an assumption that these people were irredeemable, that they were born into it and had no chance of escape. Castigating me for a lack of hope.

But I do believe there is a possible solution. I can't claim credit for it - I heard it expounded on This Week a couple of years back maybe now, by Tom Conti, the actor. The symptoms were just as Simon so eloquently and I for one think accurately described. Dependency, fecklessness, down to the next generation, leaving them unteachable with no hope, little future prospects and a complete inability to take responsibility for ones-self.

What Conti suggested, if memory serves, is that there is now a generation that belongs nowhere. Home is hostile. And without that basic need addressed they cannot grow. He suggests massive extra expenditure on education (300/400% massive), such that at the very youngest, class sizes are very small indeed - half a dozen at most at age five and actually rising slowly as you go through school. The idea is that the teacher becomes the surrogate family, that school becomes a place of refuge. That the very basics of life can be taught in a family type environment at the very start of education.

He believes that over the course of a generation this could cut most other social safety net type costs in half or more as people grow up taking more responsibility for themselves, respecting themselves, simply "able to cope" often. Aside from the obvious savings in reducing costs of crime and disorder such as Simon witnessed on the train, he was talking about basics like people knowing how to tell the difference between a common cold and something more serious and stop using up valuable medical professionals' time on trivialities, and longer term know about how to look after ones-self better - all those self esteem issues that so often drive bad health and consequent spiral of employment problems and dependency.

As I write it down though, I begin to doubt it somehow. In one sense clearly, it can be seen as the uber-nanny of all states. But can it be dressed up in those liberal clothes such as leveling the playing field and preventing or removing "enslavement by poverty, ignorance or conformity"? I think it can. Can it be afforded? I don't see how it can't, the price for not doing so is horrible.

I just picked this up on a BBC news piece. There's a new website by a group called Carbon Monitoring for Action (CARMA) which has what it calls a pretty comprehensive database of power stations and power companies from across the world showing CO2 outputs right down to individual power station levels.

It's worth a play with. I was astonished to see Australia has the worst record in terms of CO2 output per capita from power generation. Interesting too to note that France is way down the list with the greenest output of industrialized nations because of its preponderance of nuclear generation, and Brazil is way down because of its heavy use of hydro power.

More locally - Drax is rated as the 23rd most CO2 producing power station on the planet, but Didcot is about as clean as they come powered by fossil fuels: