Burn, baby, burn

Lord Stern estimated that it would require 1 per cent of GDP to move to clean and sustainable energy sources.

In 2012 the top 200 corporation spent a sum equivalent to 1 per cent of global GDP to find new sources of carbon energy. Carbon assets are currently valued at trillions of dollars but about two thirds of them will have to remain permanently unburnt to comply with current (though unformalised) international agreements on climate change.

'They only believe environmental regulation when they see it," said James Leaton, from Carbon Tracker and a former PwC consultant. He said short-termism in financial markets was the other major reason for the carbon bubble. "Analysts say you should ride the train until just before it goes off the cliff. Each thinks they are smart enough to get off in time, but not everyone can get out of the door at the same time. That is why you get bubbles and crashes."

'Paul Spedding, an oil and gas analyst at HSBC, said: "The scale of 'listed' unburnable carbon revealed in this report is astonishing. This report makes it clear that 'business as usual' is not a viable option for the fossil fuel industry in the long term. [The market] is assuming it will get early warning, but my worry is that things often happen suddenly in the oil and gas sector."'

'Stern and Leaton both point to China as evidence that carbon cuts are likely to be delivered. China's leaders have said its coal use will peak in the next five years, said Leaton, but this has not been priced in. "I don't know why the market does not believe China," he said. "When it says it is going to do something, it usually does." He said the US and Australia were banking on selling coal to China but that this "doesn't add up"'

'Jeremy Grantham, a billionaire fund manager who oversees $106bn of assets, said his company was on the verge of pulling out of all coal and unconventional fossil fuels, such as oil from tar sands. "The probability of them running into trouble is too high for me to take that risk as an investor." He said: "If we mean to burn all the coal and any appreciable percentage of the tar sands, or other unconventional oil and gas then we're cooked. [There are] terrible consequences that we will lay at the door of our grandchildren."'

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2013/apr/19/carbon-bubble-financial-crash-crisis

'"Now, with strong interconnections, and uneven recovery, that three-speed recovery is not enough and what we need is a full-speed global economy." Lagarde said growth needed to be "solid, sustainable, balanced but also inclusive and very much rooted in green developments."

'The IMF managing director said central banks were travelling in "uncharted territories" and would be more comfortable if they could return monetary policy to more normal settings.'

Alchemy in our time

It's the 3D printer and the internet. Between them they promise the new perpetual motion: perpetual knowledge and perpetual product, each feeding off itself in the new miracle of limitless creation. Never mind about the second law of thermodynamics (c.1850), look around you: it is self-evident we are headed for perpetual motion, not the heat death of the universe, in which  death is not that of Christian eschatology in which we all fry but the state in which thermodynamic differences may no longer be exploited to perform work. Not a bang; not even a whimper. Energy is the ability to perform work, as I was told in my physics lessons long ago.

But are we? Perhaps the internet is the entropy of knowledge - and the 3D printer heralds not so much the creation of everything out of nothing as the creation of nothing out of everything. An American college student has invented (and intends to market) a miniature desktop plastics recycling plant that will grind your domestic plastic rubbish and render it as cheap filament for your desktop 3D printer, thus enabling you to create for yourself all you need for survival and fulfilment from the dross in your own household - from the cradle to the cradle. The only drawback is that plastics can be reused endlessly (maybe, but maybe not, unable to survive repeated reheating) only if they are kept pure, without mixing the endless different types. So not only does 3D printing herald the end of the mixture of materials that has characterised the most sophisticated art and artifacts for generations (no bejewelled skulls here), but it must sort our plastic waste into reverse purity.

Yet meanwhile, here in my country, we find there is horsemeat in our burgers, our nationwide high-street chain for video rentals has gone into administration, Europe's most charismatic philosopher brings us less than startling news that democracy will not survive austerity as a functioning orderly political system, the most widely used insecticide has for the first time been officially labelled an "unacceptable" danger to bees feeding on flowering crops whilst its manufacturer (Bayer) warns against "over-interpretation of the precautionary principle", the head of BP announces that peak oil theories are becoming 'increasingly groundless' and that carbon dioxide emissions will continue to rise. Despite Google today celebrating the 112th aniversary of the birth of the inventer of the ice-resurfacer, it seems too early for entropy to panic.

The heat death of the universe