Tom Atkins  on April 11, 2007

I heard the interview and was likewise shocked. It’s a shame because in the absence of any other partys taking the major environmental issues seriously, some of the Green Party’s policies are a breath of fresh air.

In Cork South-West, Quentin Gargan is standing for the Greens. He’s a decent man and is also keen to use the web to communicate his message. I’ve emailed him links to this post and Justin’s asking him for his opinion.

I’ve been really enjoying Damien’s commentary on politicians (often pathetic) use of the web.

(Disclosure – I designed Quentin’s website but am in no way responsible for the content, and am not affiliated to or a member of the Green Party.)

Conor O'Neill  on April 11, 2007

I was thinking further on this yesterday and I realised what the Greens need to do in order to be taken seriously.

They need to become the “Party of Science”.

Proper environmentalism is based on rigorous science and strategic thinking. Every policy they define should be backed up with rock-solid science and a detailed long-term financial analysis proving why it is in our best interests to adopt them.

Happy clappy “let’s shut down all the power-stations and get everyone back on their bicycles” will never work.

A scientific approach includes taking bad science to task whether that is coming from the big pharma companies or clueless scaremongers.

If they take the scientific approach, they’ll lose a bunch of the usual loons who believe in the healing power of crystals and think that composting toilets should be compulsory, but what they’ll gain is mainstream respect, influence and the ability to get things done.

If they don’t then they will remain a fringe party of “well intentioned nice people” who achieve nothing other than an air of middle-class smugness.

Tom Atkins  on April 11, 2007

Well said Conor. 100% agreement with you there.

Conor O'Neill  on April 11, 2007

Nice site Tom

But looking at Quentin’s front page what I see is “Appropriate community owned wind and wave power generation. Bio-fuels for local consumption”

What I want to see is:

“The Cork South West Region currently uses N Billion KWH of energy generated using X, Y and Z at a cost on P, Q and R.

We propose to replace this with A% Wind at a cost of €J, B% Wave at a cost of €K and C% Bio-fuels at a cost of €L.

We propose to do this over S years. The overall capital cost shall come from the following sources D, E, F. The result of this long term investment is an energy generation system which costs €T per annum compared to the current €U and emits V% less heat/CO2 etc.”

In this election I refuse to vote for any party that provides vague aspirations. Give me cold hard facts, targets and numbers and you’ll get my Number 1 even if I don’t agree with all of your policies.

Conor O'Neill  on April 11, 2007

Oh and get Quentin blogging and twittering daily. I’ll subscribe if he does.

Conor O'Neill  on April 11, 2007

I’ve just realised Quentin’s site is built on Wordpress! Beat that man up to start blogging now before it is too late.

Surely there is a ton of things he could write about in this area and use the feedback via comments to help tune the Green’s message?

Tom Atkins  on April 11, 2007

With you all the way Conor! Numbers are what I want too.

On a side note: There’s an interesting press release on Quentin’s site about backyard burning. This one always gets me – poeple go on about incinerators but one ‘backyard burn’ emits more dioxins than an incinerator would be allowed to in months… but it would be much more powerful an argument with the figures to prove it.

Quentin asked me a couple of days ago to set up a blog section on his site – I’ve been a bit slow off the mark. It should be active tomorrow. I’ll comment here when it’s up.

OK I think that’s enough free publicity for the Greens from me… especially as I’m not sure how to vote yet!

Tom Atkins  on April 11, 2007

OK – Quentin’s blog section is live.

It’s me that needs beaten up as he asked me to do this on Monday. Sorry Quentin!

Quentin Gargan  on April 11, 2007

Conor says;
What I want to see is:

“The Cork South West Region currently uses N Billion KWH of energy generated using X, Y and at a cost on P, Q and R.” etc.

Quite right. I’d love to have the resources to pull out that sort of information, but I’m running my campaign on a shoestring. For good reason, Greens don’t accept corporate donations, so on PR, advertising, even preparing blogs and podcasts, we don’t have the research resources. So yes, you get some generalities and aspirations. But that is a different matter from the solid promises you get elsewhere that mean absolutely nothing when the election is over. Anybody remember the Health Strategy almost five years ago?

Under the current regime it is virtually impossible for a community to set up a wind farm. For example, just to ask Eirgrid if you can get a grid connection costs up to €30,000. Then Eirgrid can say “no”, or say “yes” but you’ll have to connect to a substation 30km away, and you’ll have to pay us as sole supplier to put in the line at whatever charge we want to make.

Other European countries have an appropriate regime that provides a grid connection automatically for wind farm developers, so that communities can own wind farms themselves, keeping the money in the locality.

When I talk about biofuels for local consumption, it is perhaps an unexplained reference to the fact that we graze cattle on marginal land that would be better used with short rotation timber cropping for wood chips. Sadly, most of the wood burning stoves installed locally only take wood pellets which have to be shipped in from further afield, and which require a lot more energy in their production than chips.

The only energy crop around here seems to be gorse and pyromania is rampant. See
Gorse Fires for more

Conor O'Neill  on April 11, 2007

As an organisation tho, you need to get this info somehow. I agree about lies and false promises but I need to at least have some sense of what I am voting for in terms of spend. Maybe tell me you are going to fire 30000 non-medical paper-shuffling buck-passing staff in the HSE and I’ll give you a vote.

I agree about wood chips. How is the Grainger biomass CHP plant viewed by the Greens?

Talked to my coalman about wood pellets – he is making sure to stay abreast of developments so that he still has a livelihood no matter what happens re coal.

Can we not generate the pellets on a local basis?

Speaking of which, I remember the wood-chip-logs initiative of the 1980’s. Were they a good idea and what happened to them?

Quentin Gargan  on April 11, 2007

CHP is a valuable part of the mix for power generation. In Moneypoint, we burn 9,000 tonnes of coal a day, and 60% of that energy goes up the chimney as lost heat. A gas fired CHP plant would be infinitely preferable to that if it was located somewhere that the heat can be locally used. As I understand it, the CHP plant in Grangers burns wood, generates electricity and uses the surplus heat to dry the wood. Win win win.

So its good. Pity it is supplied by monoculture sitka, but that’s not their fault.

CHP plants are usually flexible in their output, and as such they facilitate the introduction of wind energy, which is less flexible or predictable. All recently constructed gas fired station have been CCGT stations which ideally need to be run continuously. Thats why
The new Aghada Power Plant is the wrong type. These stations virtually sterilise the grid for wind energy, and as a result wind farms are often effectively switched off at night.

Wood pellets? An ideal way to use waste sawdust, but once a few thousand stoves go in, sawdust moves from being waste to commodity. It just doesn’t make sense to hammer mill timber into sawdust, dry it, compress it etc., all to make pellets, some of which have problems keeping themselves intact in a silo where moisture in the air turns them back into sawdust again.

The most sensible option for many is a log gassifying stove, but they aren’t grant aided, so haven’t been very popular

Conor O'Neill  on April 11, 2007

All good stuff. Any reason for the stoves not being grant aided? We’d love to get rid of our horror of an oil-fired boiler but we’ll have to wait until LouderVoice sells for €100m

Quentin Gargan  on April 11, 2007

The “official” reason for not having a grant on log gassifying stoves is that you could burn anything in them – old tyres etc. The grapevine reason is more likely to be that there’s no VAT on logs. Its a huge black market that they’d rather not support.

In the case of solar water heaters, the VAT is almost the same as the value of the grant. Give it with one hand and take it back in the other I guess…

Conor O'Neill  on April 11, 2007

I have never been able to understand VAT on items that the government wants to encourage.

Is it simply there as a tracking device and a way of having even more people in the civil service doing pointless jobs?

Quentin Gargan  on April 12, 2007

VAT either way is the most inequitable of taxes. Zero VAT on caviar because its a food, but 21% on toilet rolls? We delude ourselves into believing that this is a low tax economy on the basis of income tax, which in theory is scaled depending on your income (unless you are super rich and thus exempted by virtue of your holiday home being your real residence but that’s another story).

VAT gets paid by everyone, pensioner, social welfare recipient and squillionnaires alike.

But back to your point – charging VAT on something you encourage is a way of saying you support it, without having to spend any money on your support. Incidently to get the grant the installer has to be approved by SEI. The qualifications required? Training? Plumbing? PhD? Nope – a tax clearance certificate. QED

By the way, have the blog up and running on my site.

taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog » Don’t vote Green in Dublin Central!  on April 12, 2007

[...] Conor O’Neill has a great idea over here: I was thinking further on this yesterday and I realised what the Greens need to do in order to be [...]

Conor O'Neill  on April 12, 2007

Congrats on the blog Quentin, I’ve subscribed. I would encourage you to try and do a few posts a week even if they are only short so that people always know there is going to be regular fresh material.

This coming from someone whose business blog hasn’t been updated in nearly a fortnight!

Mary  on April 16, 2007

In relation to comment 10 you suggest that 30,000 non medical, paper-shuffling, buck-passing staff in the HSE should be fired. Yes I’m sure the medical staff would be delighted to take over admin duties, such as typing letters to GPs, organising and chasing up test results, dealing with phone calls from the public and other staff, pulling files for clinics, arranging and cancelling appointments, booking patient beds as well as their own duties and imagine the impact on them and their patients. I suggest you read the piece in the middle of page 3 of Private Eye, 13th to 26th April 2007, perhaps you may reconsider your stance.

Conor O'Neill  on April 16, 2007

Mary, you misunderstood my (flippant) comment. Every organisation requires support staff, plenty of them. I just find it impossible to believe that a health service in a tiny country requires over 100,000 staff and delivers such shockingly bad value for money!

100,000………..

If they were all functioning at the level one would expect in business, the Irish health service would be the best in the world.

Have all the computer systems of all the Health Boards been integrated yet and if not, what percentage of support staff spend their time doing repeated data entry?

Perhaps the HSE could use the method employed by Cypress Semiconductor in Silicon Valley. The bottom few percent of performers are fired every year. Those are the paper-shuffling buck-passers I am referring to.

Mary  on April 16, 2007

Conor, I was wondering alright whether it was a flippant quip. I am speaking as an ex- medical secretary, having left the HSE or SHB as it was, 4 years ago. The thing was in my time, we were understaffed and under-resourced and my colleagues and I had to deliver the best service we could under pretty trying circumstances. I agree the HSE could do worse than Cypress Semiconductor and weed out the poor performers, of which there are a few as there are in most organisations, hopefully improving services for everyone.

Fiona  on April 25, 2007

Catching up with my podcast listening, The Guardian science podcast from 5th March has a snippet from Prof Raymond Tallis on pseudoscience:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/podcasts

Just scroll down to the March 5 podcast.