The Fog Of Misinformation II – Batteries and Hydrogen Power

David Hume’s ‘Treatise On Human Nature’, in his words, “fell stillborn from the press”. I felt similar to how he must’ve felt yesterday about the fact that my stats didn’t record that anyone at all read yesterday’s post. Even so, a fair portion of what I write on here isn’t composed with an eye to a large readership as to stop myself from going on and on online by posting a link to things I’ve written on the topic. If I find that I’m saying the same thing repeatedly, I sometimes just write it up once and for all to save a bit of time, effort and boredom. I doubt anyone actually follows the links, but posting them gets the irritation out of my system.

So today’s post, which may not be read today, is supposed to finish off yesterday’s. There were a few things which came up as questions in my mind which I didn’t feel informed enough to cover. Today, then, I’ll be talking about hydrogen as a fuel, our government’s energy policy and the ethics of batteries. Here we go.

The way I understand it, hydrogen is chiefly useful as, in a sense, a means of storing power. Note that this may not be the reality, simply how I think it works. Although it’s technically a fuel, it’s produced as I understand it by the electrolysis of water and then stored as a metal hydride from which it’s slowly released and burnt, becoming water vapour again in the process. This means that whatever means of producing the electricity to split the oxidane (dihydrogen monoxide) molecules is used is the real point. It’s as if hydrogen, or rather the metal hydride, is a battery used to take that energy and use it elsewhere. As I’m typing this, I’m aware that palladium, and possibly some other metals, are able to absorb and store hydrogen for future use, so maybe that’s done as well. I’m writing this knowing very little about this use of hydrogen. I also wonder if the water vapour released from combustion would contribute significantly to global warming if this were done on a large scale, but I’m aware that hydrocarbons also produce it when they’re burnt, so maybe this is not the main point. One advantage to burning hydrogen is that it’s a lot cleaner than coal, oil and natural gas, which generate sulphur dioxide when burnt as well as carbon dioxide and soot.

That’s how I thought it worked. It isn’t reality, apparently, and I’ll come to that in a bit. Hydrogen is unusual because per mass it’s twice as efficient as petrol but per volume at atmospheric pressure it’s thousands of times less efficient. Filling a car up with a litre of petrol means a mass of around seven hundred grammes. Seven hundred grammes of hydrogen is 642 litres. Therefore, if it’s stored as the gas it needs to be pressurised to something like seven hundred times that of atmospheric pressure (bars) at sea level, which means vehicles running on hydrogen end up heavier than petrol cars due to having a hefty heavily reinforced tank containing the gas. Nor is ordinary metal okay for doing this because of the nature of hydrogen. Consisting of the smallest atoms, hydrogen atoms pass into materials very easily, although molecules cause a different problem known as high temperature hydrogen attack (HTHA). This reduces the flexibility of the metals and causes them to crack. Consequently hydrogen storage tanks have to be coated internally with something which prevents this, which makes them expensive to manufacture. Hydrogen at seven hundred bars is about a sixth the efficiency of petrol, and this is in a heavier vehicle making it still less so. All the pipelines and vessels used to move around and store hydrogen face the same problem if they are at approximate room temperature. Although this could be addressed by warming the hydrogen, with the obvious risks of explosion and inflammability as well as energy use, this leads to hydrogen becoming more atomic and reacting with carbon in steel to form methane, which unlike hydrogen cannot pass through the steel and once again causes cracking.

Hydrogen sources and extraction methods are colour-coded. Quite rarely, deposits of hydrogen can be found in a similar way to fossil fuel gas. This is white hydrogen and can be mined the same way as the more widespread gas deposits used as fuel. It should also be noted that Jupiter is a vast store of hydrogen which could theoretically be used, although it would either have to be transported or used in situ. It can also be extracted from coal (black), lignite (young coal, brown), and methane (grey). All of these are pretty obviously silly because they’re direct use of fossil fuels, which we’re supposed to be avoiding, except for methane which could be from biomasse or fire ice but isn’t. These methods are not clean anyway as they tend to leak, and they are mainly promoted by oil companies which want us to carry on using their products. Blue hydrogen combines methane extraction with carbon capture and is about one percent of production. All of these methods have about the same emissions as more conventional gas burning because carbon capture takes energy.

There is, though, green hydrogen, which is electrolysis of water using renewable energy. This does actually suffer from the intermitten power source problem mentioned yesterday, so discussing this is substantially linked to the general issue of battery manufacture and use. Finally, there is pink hydrogen, which uses nuclear power. As well as the resources used for actual production, infrastructure is needed too. So the thing I assumed at the start of this bit is actually green hydrogen and is not the usual method for extracting it.

Although it seems fair to assume that a car running on hydrogen simply burns hydrogen in pistons like a petrol car burns petrol aerosol, this is not what happens. Piston engines could be designed to run on hydrogen. However, piston engines are in any case only thirty percent efficient and burning hydrogen in them produces nitrogen oxide emissions because of the pressure and heat, which are one of the types of gases which make petrol engines bad in the first place. The lower efficiency of hydrogen compared to petrol makes the poor efficiency of the internal combustion engine more problematic than it would be were it just burning petrol.

What actually happens in a hydrogen vehicle is basically that a fuel cell is used to generate electricity to run an electric motor, like an electric vehicle but with an extra stage. Fuel cells were invented in the 1950s CE and are popular in spacecraft because they can generate electricity and provide drinking water. They work by placing a membrane made of platinum and iridium between a feed of hydrogen and one of oxygen. When the hydrogen crosses the membrane, it becomes positively charged and gives up electrons which can then be used to run an electric current, then combines with oxygen on the other side to form water. This slower, more controlled method is far more efficient than a hydrogen-fuelled internal combustion engine.

There are a few problems with this. Notable among them is the rarity and cost of platinum and iridium. The main sources of these metals are Zimbabwe, South Africa and Russia, so there is the usual issue of the metals not being available locally and some kind of ethical chain of accountability being very long and prone to being obscured unless you’re actually in Afrika south of the Sahara or Russia itself. Moreover, the water produced by fuel cells needs to be kept warm so as not to damage the fuel cell by freezing, so hydrogen-powered vehicles are either unfeasible or less efficient anywhere the temperature drops below freezing.

Only a dozen hydrogen-powered cars were sold in Britain in 2021, and four dozen buses. There were more buses in Germany but when there were problems with the hydrogen plant, they couldn’t be used. One vehicle in four thousand is currently hydrogen-powered, and as I said, hydrogen-powered cars are really just electric cars whose “batteries” are fuelled by hydrogen. As it stands, they don’t reduce emissions. Things might change a bit if metal hydrides are used to store hydrogen, but the fact remains that hydrogen is really just a way of getting electricity from the place it’s obtained to the vehicles’ internal workings. It’s electric at both ends and hydrogen is just between the two.

Okay, so that’s hydrogen. Now for the ethics of batteries.

The first thing to say about this is that much is made of the intermittent nature of solar and wind power sources. This is because of the ongoing problem of the absence of a way of storing electricity efficiently. I’m not convinced that it’s really that much of a problem here in Britain with our wind and solar power, the latter whereof does function to some extent in overcast conditions. I just wonder if there hasn’t been enough development of facilities which store electricity in batteries, specifically lithium ion batteries. There is a domestic solution involving a power wall, which is a large battery kept in a house storing unused generated power, either from local renewable methods or the grid at low-cost times, i.e. at night. This is a personal solution rather than a collective one though. I just wonder.

Lithium ion batteries are a bit of a kludge. There is an issue with them exploding and causing fires when they drop below a certain level of charge, which has been addressed by including a chip which detects when this happens and closes them down. This gives them a shelf life and means that devices with built-in batteries of this kind need to be periodically recharged even if not currently in use, because the chip itself draws some power which can take it below this threshold and permanently disable the battery. It seems odd to me that lithium batteries are so heavy, suggesting that they’re not just straightforward lithium batteries, which of course they aren’t: they’re lithium ion batteries.

Lithium is unusually electropositive, meaning that it avidly loses an electron. This is the electron on the outside orbital of the lithium atom. Lithium atoms are intercalated between sheets of graphene, single-atom layers of graphite, and repel their outer electrons, which pass along a copper conductor into whatever the battery is powering. The lithium ions are then attracted from within the graphite across a semipermeable layer and a liquid electrolyte into the other layer, which contains a cobalt oxide. Electrons flow through an aluminium conductor to this side, meaning that a current flows through the circuit the battery is supplying power to. When the battery is recharged, electrons are pulled back into the graphite side, attracting the lithium ions back and neutralising them. The semipermeable membrane separates these two sides, preventing fire or an explosion. As the battery ages, SEI – Solid Electrolyte Interphase – forms preventing the flow of lithium ions, and cobalt (II) oxide and lithium oxide form permanently. This is why the capacity of lithium ion batteries reduces over time. This process is of course somewhat reminiscent of a fuel cell’s operation.

A lithium ion battery is a rolled or folded arrangement of several layers, including copper, graphite/lithium, the electrolyte, the semipermeable membrane, the cobalt compound and aluminium.

Considering this design from an environmental perspective, it’s a composite, making it difficult to recycle. It has several layers which cannot be easily separated in bulk. It suffers from entropy too, but what doesn’t? A big issue with it, though, is where the lithium comes from.

I used to wonder why there isn’t more lithium. Hydrogen constitutes something like 74% of the mass of baryonic matter and helium twenty-four percent. Lithium, which is the third element, might be expected to be the third most common element, but it is actually quite rare. It is in fact only about as common as tellurium. This is because although a lot of lithium was produced soon after the Big Bang, there aren’t many processes which produce it apart from that and it’s relatively easily destroyed inside stars. As has already been mentioned, lithium tries really hard to give up its outer electron, so it’s always found in compounds on Earth. It’s also one of the alkali metals along with sodiumand potassium, so it tends to be found where they are as its reactions are somewhat similar, but in much smaller amounts. In the past, lithium has mainly been extracted from two minerals called spodumene and lepidolite, and sourced from Russia, followed by Zimbabwe, China, Canada and Portugal, all of which were way behind. A lot of lithium is from the salt flats of Bolivia and Chile’s Atacama Desert – sodium chloride is, as you might suppose, associated with smaller amounts of lithium. Unsurprisingly, indigenous populations are adversely affected by the extraction of the metal and it uses up a lot of fresh water, which is particularly problematic in a desert where it doesn’t rain for centuries at a time (and has lots of seagulls nesting, but that’s another story). The growth in lithium demand in the past three decades has been enormous. Forty percent of the planet’s output is consumed by China. Most electric vehicle batteries are made in China. This yet again makes much of the global economy dependent on China and means that it could place the same kind of stranglehold on them as Russia has on oil supplies if someone does something they don’t like. This puts a lot of pressure on the South American sources. The alternative might be to develop a battery based on a more abundant resource, and this may in fact be happening in the form of sodium ion batteries.

Obviously sodium is extremely abundant on this planet and many others. They have no explosion risk and have been developed since the ’70s, but were abandoned when lithium ion batteries started to take off. Their energy density is lower. I should explain this. Energy density is the amount of energy that can be stored in a given volume. This means that these batteries take up more space and are heavier than lithium ion ones, making them less suitable for vehicles but more so for domestic and grid energy storage. They have no cobalt, removing the ethical problem therewith which I haven’t mentioned yet. Instead, they have a variety of designs, including a carbon anode and alloy cathode made from nickel, manganese, magnesium, titanium and oxygen. Another design makes extensive use of Prussian blue, a well-established pigment which has been made for more than three centuries. The batteries can be recharged more times than lithium ones and they work well at a wider temperature range, from -20 to +60°C. However, I have a bit of a nagging doubt about them because Elon Musk is involved and a lot of his stuff is overhyped trash, so I’m just hoping they have a life outside his fantasy world.

I’ve kind of skipped over cobalt here, so I’ll go back to it now. Seventy percent of cobalt originates from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where things are, to say the least, not good. War has destroyed the ability to farm safely due to looting, sexual assault and other forms of violence, and consequently many women now work in mining. Due to lack of education, most women and men are not aware that women can work legally in the mines and women are therefore expected to engage in transactional sex to gain access to employment. I am absolutely not a SWERF. Even so, the 25% of women who are sex workers in mining towns might well be able to live happier lives and be productive in different ways if they weren’t doing that, and they need to have greater career flexibility. Forty percent of women have to trade sex to have their basic needs met. The collapse of mining tunnels is a regular occurrence in the country, bringing with it many injuries and deaths, even of teenagers working in the mines. Accompanying that are the health hazards associated with cobalt mining, which are unsurprisingly respiratory issues from the dust and also gastrointestinal and cardiac disease. This is the usual situation of the rich countries in the world exporting their exploitation to the former colonies so that Black people can suffer and die to prop up White people’s lifestyles. And yes, I absolutely am guilty of this, typing this as I am on a laptop powered by lithium ion batteries, as is my mobile, tablet and Walkman. Some families have banded together in the country to prosecute Apple, Microsoft, Dell, Google and Tesla for their roles in the injuries and deaths of their children. It will be very surprising if they win, and even if they do I can’t see it making any difference.

And this is my fault. I did try to get a refurbished mobile ‘phone the last time I replaced my old one (which was not a smart ‘phone incidentally but did contain a lithium ion battery), but due to lack of diligence I ended up accidentally buying a new one. The shop I went into sold both new and refurbished devices and I mistook a new one for a used one. Now you might say that my responsibility is diffused by the number of other people who are complicit in this exploitation, but there are also a lot of people being exploited so that doesn’t work as an argument. But wallowing in guilt and shame can substitute for doing something about it, so I’ll move on.

That leaves me with HM govt’s energy policy, bearing in mind that this same policy will doubtless be pursued by the fake Labour administration we’re probably about to vote in next year. I’m used to talking about nuclear energy policy and am quite well-informed about that. The Tories held Uxbridge and South Ruislip on Thursday, much to everyone’s surprise, probably partly due to the electorate’s hatred of Green policies, and consequently they plan to double down on their plan which will wipe out the human race, it being an obvious vote winner. Seriously though, I don’t understand what the motivation is, either for the policy makers or the voters. Perhaps if they were also child-free, it would make sense, because then it would be an «après moi le déluge» type thing.

Okay, so we’re paying a lot more for energy per household nowadays. This is because 40% of our electricity is generated by gas-fired power stations and also 85% of domestic boilers. Gas prices went up due to a rise in demand associated with the pandemic, then the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. It can be addressed by improving energy efficiency, such as with insulation and heat pumps, and the installation of solar panels and other forms of renewable energy such as heat turbines. This would also help us achieve Net Zero. The question of what has not been done is also important. In the 1970s, the UK was a world leader in wave power. Thatcher trashed that. Solar panels need to be on roofs rather than in fields, since they are usually just sitting there unoccupied. Helical wind turbines take up less space than windmill-style ones. Scotland can be self-sufficient in wind power. I am interested in knowing what’s happened with storing electricity in lithium and sodium ion batteries to address this apparently intermittent supply caused by renewables, and also in how tidal and wave power could be intermittent when Cynthia constantly orbits our planet. There is a strong tendency for governments to point out that we are in a situation now and the time for action was years ago. Well, what’s happening now we need to address then? Also, we’ve clearly been beholden to theocracies in the Middle East for decades, leading to us letting them get away with atrocities, and fighting wars against them because they’ve got the oil. Self-sufficiency in energy would very plainly stop this. Maybe there’s a reason why they don’t want to stop it?

Bats and birds are killed by wind turbines. Set against this can be the deaths caused by climate change and the processes whereby fossil fuels are mined, transported and used in power stations, and although I don’t know figures it’s unlikely to be as many as those processes kill. Wind turbines aren’t even as significant a cause of death as domestic cats. The high figure for dinosaurian deaths in the US is 234 000 – it may be much lower. This compares to four billion (short scale) killed by cats, sevenety-two million by pesticides, sixty million by cars, 174 million by power lines and a billion by cars. But every death is the end of the world for the deceased organism and we are as culpable for these deaths as we would be if we went out and shot them, so prevention is still important. Sea birds tend to learn to avoid wind turbines, so that helps. Bats are also casualties, with 600 000 deaths a year in this way caused by pockets of air near the windmill blades which rupture the lungs due to high pressur. White nose syndrome, a fungal infection, kills millions in North America. The problem can be dealt with by keeping turbines at least two kilometres from high bird population areas, the use of ultrasonic sources to disrupt bat sonar, which in fact doesn’t do so but leads to them avoiding the turbines, painting the turbines purple, which repels both prey insects and vertebrates, using ultraviolet light to illuminate the blades at light so they don’t mistake their supporting poles for trees, making the blades shorter and increasing their height, shutting down turbines to allow flocks of animals to fly through the areas by detecting early strikes and/or weather RADAR, which picks them up anyway. Helical wind turbines needn’t be steered, operate at low wind speeds, are quieter, have fewer moving parts, are more suitable for residential areas and therefore microgeneration, are safer for human workers because they’re shorter, can be scaled down to domestic use, cheaper, more easily installed and, crucially, less risky to bats and birds. However, they also have more drag and suffer from the greate turbulence near the ground, which may lead to needing more maintenance.

I’ll just briefly address tidal power. It damages marine environments and life. Other problems include high cost and presumably, and this is a guess, they’re more suitable for islands than continental countries, even those which are not landlocked or lack significantly tidal bodies of water. The British Isles are, however, rather suitable.

So to recap, and suggesting possible feedback, I think I did okay on the hydrogen power thing and the batteries but I still feel rather vague about government energy policy. That’s it really. No pics today apparently.

الروح تسافر بوتيرة الجمل

This is obviously from Google Earth. It’s approximately pentagonal and covers much of Western Europe. Most of it is within the territory of the Roman Empire at maximum extent, but not all. But what is it?

This is the polygon formed by the extreme points of my movements on the surface of this planet. It took around eight years to form this shape, and in fact I’ve just realised some of it is missing because I forgot Aberdeen, which extends the time period to nine years.

Here’s a revised version then:

Right, so now it’s a hexagon and it clearly shows the curvature of the planet because it’s slightly zoomed out. This, then, is the area I’ve occupied and visited in my life. I also visited all of it by travelling by road, rail or ferry. The westernmost point was actually by bike. The maximum distance within this area is between Rome and Inverness, which are 2 112 kilometres apart.

Although I have four times committed the sin of air travel in an heavier than air craft, which also occurred within this hexagon, I had already reached all these points overland and sea, and later on under the sea bed once the Channel Tunnel was built. It’s a modest area compared to many Westerners to be sure, but it has the virtue of having been experienced every step of the way on the surface. I didn’t have the dislocation one experiences of stepping into an airliner and off it again a few hours later without having witnessed the transition from, say, the green chalk downs and streams of Kent and Northern France to the near-desert of Burgos.

The earliest point on this map was laid down in August 1987 CE, when my brother and I visited Aberdeen. Aberdeen is Scotland’s third city, pretty isolated compared to Dundee, Edinburgh and Glasgow, and largely made of granite. Even though it was the height of summer, it was a grey, overcast day and pretty cold really. It was also really windy. Aberdeen kind of has a beach, but I get the impression there isn’t much sunbathing on it. To be honest, even Blackpool in England, 370 kilometres to the south, isn’t really suitable for sunbathing or swimming in my opinion. Remarkably, though, like many other coastal towns in Britain, Aberdeen has its share of seaside shops selling buckets and spades and inflatables for the water, so I suppose there are people made of sterner stuff than I.

Inverness is only 133 kilometres from Aberdeen and I’ve been there a few times. Once again it can be exceedingly windy but it seems to be warmer than Aberdeen. Aberdeen has been known to drop below freezing in August, although its average temperature is 8.8°C, whereas Inverness averages 9.2 and has never dropped below freezing in August. It’s also a lot smaller than Aberdeen and doesn’t look overwhelmingly grey, has the fastest river in Britain running through it, which is also very short and probably would’ve stopped any Nessie candidates from entering or leaving the loch. Being the capital of the Highlands, like many other Scottish cities and towns Inverness has a lot more in the way of facilities than an English settlement of similar size.

The next corner of the hexagon is Inishmore, an island off the coast of County Galway and almost as far west as you can go in Europe. Its western end is 9° 50′ west of Greenwich and is unsurprisingly the furthest west I’ve ever been. There used to be an incredibly competitive pair of ferry services to it who would frantically plead and cajole you talking nineteen to the dozen to get you to use their boat rather than the other’s, but this is apparently no longer so because one of them sank the other’s boat! Sarada, I and our daughter cycled the length of the island and encountered its frankly terrifying cliff edge that runs along the southwest edge, and in fact I wonder in a geologically naïve way whether this is connected to it being on the edge of a continent, but whereas that’s an appealing idea it’s probably quite fanciful. Even so, the nearest land on that latitude to the west is over three thousand kilometres away on the east coast of Canada, or rather it’s Double Island in Nova Scotia. I visited Inishmore in 1995. Inverness was the site of a terminal argument between my first girlfriend and me about free range eggs, and County Galway marked the point at which two close friends of ours, with whom we’d gone on holiday, split up, so maybe there’s something about extreme points which puts relationships under stress, like the sweater curse.

The next point is Madrid, where Sarada and I went on our honeymoon in June and July 1993 and have since revisited. Sarada used to live in Madrid, so she was revisiting it after some time away. Madrid is a number of things. It’s at the geographical centre of Spain and the first one of these points which is within the former Roman Empire although it isn’t actually a Roman city and it really shows with its very irregular street pattern. It’s hot and dry, and has a population of three million. The line between Inishmore and Madrid is almost 1 500 kilometres long and cuts across entirely Roman Catholic territory. Because it’s probable that the Gaels came from Spain, I’m likely to have an exclusively male-line connection with Spanish Celts living there in Roman times. I don’t feel a particular affinity with Spain but I do kind of wonder if the reason we got stuck in Burgos was that my ancestors were grabbing my ankles and pulling me down. Spain also hold the distinction of being the only place I’ve ever managed to get sunburnt, owing to being stuck outside in the midsummer Sun for weeks on end while we struggled to get back to England. This led to a flaky skin condition on my face which, surprisingly, resolved when I visited the next point of the hexagon.

Which is Rome, 1 300 kilometres or so almost due East, and once again the line cuts over exclusively Roman Catholic countries. Rome is just awesome. I first went there in July 1988 when I was interrailing with friends, and I was absolutely blown away by the place. Everything is still there! Well, not everything, but the layout of the streets and many of the buildings are ancient Roman. It was when I went back in about 2004 that my skin condition cleared up but unfortunately it returned once I went back to Britain and I was stuck with it for almost another decade. Rome is the furthest east I’ve been, whereas Madrid is the furthest south, but the two cities are on similar latitudes. Rome is 12° 30′ east, whereas Madrid is 40° 25′ north.

The last point is Innsbruck, the famous origin of the ‘Hitch-Hiker’s Guide To The Galaxy’ and visited a few days before Rome in July 1988 on my interrailing session. It shares a number of features with Aberdeen and perhaps Inverness to a lesser extent. It’s in a mountainous area, it doesn’t mark any compass point extremities for me and it’s the third largest city in a Germanic-speaking partly mountainous Western European country. On my hexagon, it also shares a side with Aberdeen, and this line finally enters Protestant territory. This line is also the only one which cuts across countries I’ve never entered, namely Germany and the Netherlands. The interior of the shape, however, also includes the whole of Belgium, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein and Andorra, none of which are familiar to me. The whole northeastern line ventures into vagueness, but this is probably because the west side is mainly ocean.

Countries which are completely enclosed include Andorra, Liechtenstein, Belgium, the Vatican (just – I’ve walked round it so it has no exposed side even if I hadn’t been elsewhere in Rome such as Trastevere), Monaco, Luxembourg, Switzerland and of course France, the largest country which is entirely enclosed. The centre of the area seems to be Limoges (“Lions In My Own Garden – Exit Someone”). The total area is larger than any US state and all but twelve countries.

It doesn’t need saying that I have by no means covered every square centimetre of this area, but that brings up a more general issue about what it means to be in a place. If I counted countries instead, the area would stretch from Out Stack to La Restinga and Roque del Barbudo to Museo di Ecologia degli Ecosistemi Mediterranei in Italy (just). It’s also notable that I actually live in the northwest of this area and have explored mainly south and east, and that the northernmost point is still in Great Britain. The largest number of borders between me and home is three, in the Vatican and Austria. The perimeter is getting on for a seventh of the way round the world, a distance light would travel in a single frame of video. However, this depends on the accuracy of that perimeter, because depending on what counts as an area I’ve been to.

The distance to the horizon seems like a reasonable measure, and it might make a difference to my polygon because of St Anton Am Arlberg. While I was in Austria, I climbed the Arlberg, not all the way to the top because it did the usual thing of appearing to be entirely ahead of me every time I thought I’d managed to get most of the way up it. I took a stone from it home with me, which over millions of years might make it a bit shorter if everyone did it so maybe don’t. Therefore it would be cheating to say that the furthest I’ve got sight of on this planet would be the view of the the horizon from the peak of the Arlberg, or rather the Valluga, which is 2 811 metres above sea level, which could extend to a further peak in theory. This is 189 kilometres to sea level, which is at least as far as the Großglockner, which is in any case the highest mountain in Austria and therefore would be easily visible from the Valluga on a clear day. It’s 12° 41′ east, therefore beating Rome by eleven minutes of arc. Beyond that, it becomes rather indeterminate as, for instance, another peak twice as distant but the same height twice as far away would also be visible in the same conditions, and beyond that the refraction of the atmosphere becomes significant. It’s possible to see slightly further than the horizon would be in a vacuum because the atmosphere refracts light and makes distant objects seem higher up than they really are. On Venus this situation is extreme and the viewpoint seems to be at the bottom of a basin when it’s on a flat surface, but it still happens on Earth.

It’s odd that even though German is my second language, sort of, I’ve never actually been to Germany. The languages indigenous to the polygon are English, Irish, Gàidhlig, Welsh, Manx, Cornish, Breton, French, Flemish, Luxembourgisch, Alsatian, Italian, Castilian, Provençal, Latin (the Vatican), German, Dutch, various Swiss and Northern Italian Romance languages and Basque. That’s all surviving Celtic languages and one non-Indo-European language. As for population, it’s harder to work out but it’s above a hundred million people. It’s also large enough for the angles not to conform with plane Euclidean geometry and therefore also area. It covers more than 19° of the curve of the planet. From north to south, a degree of longitude at the latitude of Inverness is fifty-nine kilometres and the same at Madrid’s latitude is eighty-five, nearly half as long again. Most of the area is on land but the biggest area of water is the Celtic Sea and the Bay of Biscay.

I feel a sense of being at home within this irregular hexagon, but more towards the northwest than in other directions. Italy and Spain appeal to me but they don’t feel like my native land, but I think of myself as primarily a White Northwestern European, and by that I include the British Isles, Low Countries, northern part of France, Denmark and the German-speaking countries. I don’t get more specific than that, except that I feel duty-bound to learn Gàidhlig due to my heritage and the fact that it’s endangered. Through that, I feel I should make a connection with the musical tradition of the Q-Celtic areas. I think of Q-Celtic as a linguistic continuum stretching from southwest Ireland to northern Scotland interrupted by speakers mainly of Anglic languages historically. However, I also have it in perspective and am aware that there are many more speakers of Urdu and other North Indian languages in these isles than all of the Q-Celtic speakers put together. I’m also dubious about the idea of Celtic identity and about the idea that Celtic identity is dubious. Nonetheless, every living native speaker of a Celtic language has ancestry within this hexagon, and also every living first language Basque speaker. No other language family or sub-family is represented here in this way. It also contains an unusually large number of imperial capitals with all the dubiosity that carries with it: Rome, Madrid, Paris, London, Brussels and just barely Amsterdam, which is twenty kilometres from the line between Innsbruck and Aberdeen. The so-called “Golden Triangle” of wealth within Europe, which seems no longer to be recognised, is partly outside it.

That’s it really. That’s the area I have direct and contiguous experience of, not separated by air travel. I think this is important because it gives me some kind of inkling of the size of the planet, its shape and its connections. It would be increasingly difficult to grasp a larger area of this kind, and much harder to travel on the surface through it.

The soul travels at the pace of a camel.

A Small, Cold, Independent State

This is going to be a bit unusual for me because I normally argue things from a left-wing political perspective. On this occasion, though, the evidence I’m going to present is not easily classifiable as left or right wing, although in a sense it’s right wing by default as it’s about the world as it is as opposed to how it should be, with one minor detail: Scotland should be independent.

I’m not aware of how the SNP argues for this, so this is not based on their views and may or may not correlate with them. My perception of the SNP is that in recent decades it’s been a social democratic party which I’d feel comfortable voting for even leaving aside their views on Scottish home rule, so for me that’s an added bonus. I also, however, worry a little that this is a pragmatic position rather than one they feel more deeply.

Two contrary forces operating in supranational politics are the tendency towards alliances and the tendency towards autonomy. It’s hard to reconcile these two. With respect to the EU, I’m reluctantly in favour of it, but I’d be far more enthusiastically in favour of it if the aim was to create a democratic federal republic. This as such is a little disturbing as it’s close to what Oswald Mosley wanted and I don’t think of myself as fascist. However, Mosley’s vision was for the European Union, which is apparently what he called it, to become a White homeland, whereas I would prefer it to have open borders and welcome all immigrants without even any passport controls. I suspect that practically nobody agrees with me on this. As far as my own ethnicity is concerned, I consider myself to be a White Northwestern European, and apparently my genes come close to confirming that but for a small element of the kind of genetic profile typical of a Cape Verdean. I definitely don’t identify as a Celt or Gael despite the largest part of my ancestry being traditional Q-Celtic language speakers. In fact I’m not even sure Celtic is a valid ethnicity.

As a White Northwestern European I probably feel I have most genetically, for what it’s worth, in common with the White inhabitants of the British Isles, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Northern France and Germany. I can’t account in detail for the West Afrikan connection but I’ve long suspected it was there. When it comes down to it, you’re not Black unless you’re Black, and I’m not Black. That’s about how other people perceive you. There is a very slight tendency for me to feel the prejudice – I got called the P-word at school for example, and my mother used to think my skin was dirty and thought I was that colour because I didn’t wash enough – but to be honest I have got to be the Whitest person in the world. My ethnicity is almost irrelevant to the question of Scottish independence.

But not entirely. The most likely explanation for my West Afrikan ancestry is likely to be connected to the involvement of Glasgow in the Atlantic slave trade, so I only exist because of that. A tiny strand of my ancestry – let’s be personal, we’re talking real people here – came through those notorious rape rooms in Senegambia and somehow arrived in Scotland. I care about that, have a tenuous personal connection, but I still feel that I should honour who those people, stripped of their names, were, even though I know practically nothing of their lives. And this is “a big boy did it and ran away” territory, because Scotland was heavily involved in the Empire and the Atlantic slave trade, and let’s not pretend it wasn’t. The money which built those grand buildings in Glasgow is drenched in the blood of Black Afrikans. In terms of historical justice it’s tempting to ask why Scotland should deserve to be independent with a history like that? Except that the history is not that clear cut. There are the Highland Clearances, the loss of my clan’s land, the Scottish famine, less talked about than the Irish one, and in any country there is inequality, and here’s where I will start to go kind of statistical.

Here, then, are two propositions supported by evidence, one rather vague just now, and one definitely not:

• Smaller countries tend to “do better” than large ones.
• Colder countries are richer than bigger ones.

The former invites the question: what does “do better” mean? There are various answers to this, including per capita income, general wealth and equality of income. The more equal the wealth distribution in a country is, the happier all its citizens are, so this is a desirable thing to achieve in that respect. Most of the countries in the top ten of this measure have a population of under ten million, which are Finland, Slovakia, Slovenia, Norway, Belarus, Iceland, Czechia, the Netherlands, the Ukraine and Sweden. Of these, the Netherlands and the Ukraine both have more than ten million inhabitants and Czechia has just over ten million. Incidentally, the “United” Kingdom is the thirteenth most unequal country.

Nine of the ten richest countries are also small and of those eight have fewer than six million people. Per capita, the ten wealthiest countries are, in order, Qatar, Macao, Luxembourg, Singapore, Brunei, Ireland, the UAE, Kuwait, Switzerland and San Marino. It’s worth noting that some of these countries are also extremely nasty politically, but that’s not the issue right now. The next four are Norway, Hong Kong, the US and Iceland. Iceland is arguably a microstate, and San Marino definitely is. Oil money is clearly involved with some of these, but their wealth doesn’t reflect that of their regions. For instance, Singapore is far wealthier than Malaysia and Indonesia. The outlier is the US. Macao and Hong Kong are arguably not independent, which brings the Netherlands and Denmark into this list, and again Denmark has about five million people. The “U”K is twenty-sixth. By GDP, this list is entirely different, but that’s not relevant either. By this standard, the poorest non-island nation is Guinea-Bissau, which is a small country at less than two million people, but it’s also near the bottom for per capita income, so clearly it isn’t a magical recipe for wealth. In general, the small rich countries have little in common. They may have lots of natural resources or very few, may be densely or sparsely populated and they may be in wealthy or poor regions of the world. The size in terms of population is a more important factor than any of these.

What these countries tend to have in common is that they’re dependent on other countries for trade. A country with fewer people will make fewer goods and provide fewer services and if it’s also small in terms of area, it’s less likely to have so many physical resources, although as I’ve said this doesn’t have as much bearing on the situation. Therefore they have to import a lot and their smaller markets may mean they also export a lot. This means that they need to have fewer barriers to trade than larger countries, and they can’t afford to fund large bureaucracies. Their citizens are more likely to have dealings with those of other nations. One consequence of this is that they tend to have lower taxes, less debt and less deficit, because they have less to fund and simply can’t afford to run up debts, so they don’t, but this has positive consequences. It’s the old adage that if you owe the bank a million, you have a problem, but if you owe them a “billion”, the bank has a problem, which means as a large country you have the leverage to do this, so perhaps you do, but that may not be a good thing. Hence a country like the US can run up a debt, but not San Marino, and this is the Micawber Principle:

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”

Wilkins Micawber, from ‘David Copperfield’ by Charles Dickens.

These are countries which are not in debt and are therefore not miserable.

Moreover, more urbanised countries tend to be richer. It needs to be made clear what this means. A country could be very large and empty with most of its population living in one city. That would be an urbanised country. By that standard, Outer Mongolia is highly urbanised because half of its population lives in Ulaanbaatar. However, this is not as reliable a predictor of wealth as the size of a country. Liechtenstein is one of the least urbanised countries in the world and also one of the wealthiest per capita, and is also one of only two double-landlocked countries, so it’s likely to be a special case in some way although I don’t know how. Kuwait, Monaco, Nauru, Singapore, Vatican City, Hong Kong and Macao are all 100% urbanised and all very wealthy. Qatar and San Marino are more than 99% urbanised. At the other end of the scale, Papua, Niger, Burundi, Malawi and Rwanda are all poor and all less than 18% urbanised. The question of cause and effect arises here, since a country may not have the money to urbanise but also, once it does feedback loops could make it wealthier. Uruguay is the most urbanised country in South America and also the richest per capita and most socially progressive.

The third factor I want to consider here is climate. Cold countries appear to be richer than warm ones. The most noticeable outlier here is Australia, but even there the city of Darwin is the poorest state capital even though it’s closer to potential trading partners. The others are Bahrain, Qatar, the UAE and Singapore, all of which are small countries, and in the other direction North Korea is unusually poor for a cold country. Scandinavia is famously wealthy, and it isn’t a latitude thing either because Switzerland is also rich. It’s possible to correlate per capita income and mean temperature to the extent that every degree Centigrade/Kelvin rise makes the average citizen US $762 poorer. Little research has been done on this, but there is a statistical measure known as R² which is relevant here. This is the “coefficient of determination”, which expresses how much variation in the dependent variable can be predicted by the independent one. It can be used to test hypotheses. Testing the hypothesis that mean temperature determines per capita income gives an R² of 9%, which is actually quite large and indicates that there is no separate factor which hasn’t been taken into consideration here. Hence it isn’t merely a correlation. A causal factor is involved.

This situation is in fact the reverse of the ancient world, where the wealthiest civilisations were in hotter regions, such as Ancient Egypt, Greece, Babylon and the Maya. This was due to food production, and as this became a less important factor in determining wealth, particularly with the Industrial Revolution, the situation reversed. There are a number of theories, one of which is that storing up food and fuel for the winter needs a degree of labour and organisation which leads to a work ethic, and perhaps more structures with added value such as sturdy buildings and stores. This strikes me as racist, because it seems to me that there are plenty of warm climates with wet and dry seasons and harsh conditions which require the same kind of preparation. There could also be a correlation between cold climates and particular kinds of arrangements of terrain which bring this result. For whatever reason though, and here I am ignoring my political instincts because this would seem to preserve injustice, cold countries are richer than hot ones. They’re also more liberal, which may or may not be connected, and if this is just local “liberalism” maintained at the cost of oppressive régimes elsewhere it isn’t worth it.

This brings up the issue of globalism and nationalism. I’ve previously entertained the notion of a unified world on this blog, with a single state ruling over the entire human race. This is potentially problematic because of political obligation – the purported duty of citizens to obey the law and recognise the government of the country they live in. It would mean there would be nowhere for dissidents to escape to, no choice of which kind of state to live in and therefore no moral reason to obey the law. There would also be no external pressure. This is already a problem with the larger nations such as China, Russia and the United States. Consequently, in my imaginings for my as-yet uncompleted novel ‘1934’, I supposed there to be enclaves of microstates in an otherwise unified world, as places citizens could opt to live in, therefore preserving some degree of free choice and therefore political obligation. Nonetheless the idea of a unified world is most alluring, and in a way it’s a shame to want there to be ever-smaller independent political units instead.

However, from an apparently neutral position, consider this. There could be a small independent country with a cold climate which is highly urbanised. Of course you know which country I’m referring to, but bear with me. It could be Sakhalin, Tierra Del Fuego, the Malvinas or the Aleutians: the argument would be similar, and I have no stake in any of those, although the Malvinas as an independent state could’ve had interesting consequences for British politics in 1982 CE. This country, regardless of its character apart from those, would be beneficial to the people living in it, regardless of their ethnicity. This is not a nationalistic argument but a practical one, and it applies to anyone in that country. It’s also ahistorical in the sense that it doesn’t rely on anything more than the situation in that country as it is now – it’s not a question of justice, for example. All it is, is an argument that a small, cold country which is heavily urbanised would be better off independent than as part of a larger, warmer and less heavily urbanised country, regardless of industry, politics, lifestyle, culture and so forth. All other things being equal, in other words.

That country is of course Scotland.

An independent Scotland would join the ranks of those other better nations, with a dream combination of characteristics. It has a population of five and a half million, which would make it about the size of Denmark. In fact it may be worth playing a bit of a game here regarding the ranks of an independent Scotland in the world:

Population: 119th of 235, between Norway and Slovakia.

Area: 116th of 195, between Panama and Czechia.

Urbanisation: 71%, 68th of 194, equal to Italy.

Mean annual temperature: 8.2°C, the 29th coldest of 194, between Nepal and the Ukraine.

Considered as part of the “United” Kingdom, most of these figures change considerably:

Population: 21st of 235, between Thailand and France.

Area: 78th of 195, between Guinea and Uganda.

Urbanisation: 83.9%, 33rd of 194, between Sa`udi Arabia and the Bahamas.

Mean annual temperature: 8.45°C, the 32nd coldest of 194, between the US and Chile.

I’m going to gerrymander the figures a bit here. England’s population tends to live in a relatively large number of cities, and there’s a pattern of a large number of small settlements in the South, with the exception of London, and a small number of large settlements in the North. Wales is somewhat similar, although I admit I haven’t run the figures for it. Apparently it’s the size of Wales. Scotland, by contrast, has the Greater Glasgow area, Edinburgh and the region around it, and Aberdeen, and of these Glasgow is proportionately enormous. Consequently, I think there’s an argument for describing Scotland as heavily urbanised in a way England isn’t, even if London is included in the latter. If Greater London was proportionately the size of Greater Glasgow by population, it would have about twenty million people living in it. England and Wales taken together are nowhere near that urbanised if you look at those figures for a moment. This is partly an issue of how local government differs in the countries concerned.

Taking the figures for income, Scotland is 0.25°C colder than England. This equates to a per capita income rise of £144.78 with spurious accuracy. But look at the countries Scotland and the “U”K are bracketed with in other ways. Norway and Slovakia are both doing really well economically. Slovakia in particular improved enormously after independence from Czechoslovakia even though Czechia subsidised it economically before that. In terms of area, Scotland is close to Czechia, which also did well after independence from Czechoslovakia. These two comparisons are particularly interesting as both involve a European country becoming newly independent, albeit in the former Eastern Bloc. Compare this to Guinea and Uganda. That said, Afrika is disproportionately poor compared to much of the rest of the world. In terms of population, Scotland is between two rich countries whereas the “U”K is between a relatively poor country, though not terribly so, and a rich one. I would also say that there are synergistic effects involved. Scotland isn’t just a cold country, a small country or an urbanised country, but all three. I’d suggest that this would have a more than additive effect.

One of the notable things about Scotland compared to England is that before the nineteenth century the former had five universities, including two in Aberdeen, and England had only two, in spite of its higher population. Scotland had 1.6 million people in it in 1801 whereas England’s population was 10.5 million. In other words, Scotland had one university per 320 000 people but England had only one for over five million. This, to my mind, says a lot about the anti-intellectualism of the English nation, but it also seems to be linked to the greater innovation and inventiveness of Scotland. This, unsurprisingly, is where I start to consider Scotland as a specific nation than just as a generic nation with several promising characteristics, but bear in mind that with the advantages it has already, it can be expected to do better going it alone than if it stays in the Union.

There are perhaps four major scenarios for a positive Scottish future in these circumstances, and obviously a more negative possibility played up by unionists. I’m going to look at the negative one first. Unionists sometimes claim that Scotland is financially propped up by England. Also, a recent report by the LSE highlighted the problems Scotland might experience in re-joining the EU. I’m not an expert on these things. The problem for Scotland rejoining the EU is that most of its trade is with England rather than other EU countries. The same kind of issue, though, has beset the Irish economy until at least the 1980s, and to the extent that Ireland still relies on Britain today, will continue to do so. However, it’s relatively easy for Scotland and Ireland to trade because they’re closer to each other than England and France, and this assumes that there will be no change in the Scottish economy after independence.

Four other options are:

• An oil-based economy
• A renewable energy-based economy
• Banking and finance focus
• High-tech focus.

It should also be borne in mind that the Scottish economy already has thriving sectors apart from oil, notably alcohol, particularly whisky, and does export substantially outside of the EU.

The oil-based option should now be considered to be past because of anthropogenic climate change. I would also personally very much dislike the banking and finance option, because that’s not actually doing things, besides any ethical considerations. Renewable energy is another issue. Last year almost 100% of Scotland’s electricity was from renewable sources. There are considerable options for hydroelectricity, wind power and tidal. The average wind speed in Britain is 8.2 knots. Eight of the ten windiest places in Britain are in Scotland, which is entirely on the northwestern side of the Tees-Exe Line with its high peaks and windier weather. It would not take an enormous amount of effort to push Scottish renewable energy production into surplus. The country is also a world leader in tidal power development. This used to be true of the Union in general until Thatcher pulled the plug on it.

I would also like to return to the issue of high technology. My own family invented the defibrillator and the bimetallic strip thermostat, but I don’t want to blow my own trumpet. Scots also invented the television, telephone, discovered antibiotics, were the first to clone mammals (ethically unacceptable of course but still an invention), invented the MRI scanner, the cash machine, colour photography, the toaster, the flushing toilet, I mean I could go on. The thing to remember about Scotland is that it’s inventive and inquisitive, and has a strong educational tradition. It might lose the oil but that doesn’t mean it won’t be able to invent its way out of the deficit that may lead to. Estonia is a good example of a country which managed to improve its lot after independence by providing free Wi-Fi in its capital and making coding a compulsory subject in schools. Scotland could do something similar.

To conclude then, I have by no means focussed particularly strongly on the issue of Scottish independence in my life, but an initial assessment of the situation strongly suggests that it would indeed be successful even leaving aside any of the specific strengths of the Scottish nation. And having such a successful nation next door could also serve as a good example to England as to how it could be better-governed than it actually is. As I say, I have no idea how the SNP or the Scottish independence movement campaign generally, but as an independent thinker on this issue I can see that Scotland would be far better off going it alone.