Q: When is a low-carbon fuel not a low-carbon fuel?

A: When it’s hydrogen.

If you think that’s not funny, you’re right. It’s not. Hydrogen is being touted as a climate saviour, yet would actually lead to greater carbon emissions.

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Software, whether that’s a CD, a text file of a book, or a computer program, is a good with a marginal cost of zero. Hence basic economics tells us an individual act of software copying makes society in aggregate better off and harms nobody (because the total producer surplus plus consumer surplus is maximised when price = marginal cost). In nearly all societies historically, copying software has been perfectly legal; sharing information is precisely what allowed us to develop civilisation in the first place.

The reason why software ‘pircay’ is forbidden in today’s society is that we’ve decided that granting a monopoly (which would normally be prohibited by law…) to people who invent particular kinds of stuff, is the best way to incentivise more people to invent more stuff. Originally, this was done through patents; copyrights were introduced later for similar reasons (in both cases, there were also tax and censorship benefits for the government, but that’s another story).

But in short, by permitting these controls, society has decided to set aside basic moral principles for a utilitarian goal. That’s great, and copyright is probably the least worse way of incentivising people to create things. It would be better if it worked more like patenting - 20 years’ protection and you have to publicly disclose the source code - but it works better than alternatives like funding all research out of taxation.

However, this does mean that anyone who thinks software copying is something immoral, rather than something which is a wholly positive act in and of itself, but which regrettably has to be illegal for the greater good, has no moral understanding at all. And anyone who thinks it’s theft not only has no moral understanding, but also no understanding of what words mean…

DK has managed to dig up an extremely wrong-headed article on the Georgia versus Russia conflict over South Ossetia. Marius Ostrowski tries to put the ‘Russia is terribly terribly bad; just because the people of South Ossetia are Russian, want to be part of Russia and the Georgians keep trying to kill them doesn’t mean it’s in the right’ argument into a UK context:

Let’s say the Channel Islands suddenly decide they dislike the UK government (not hard to see why, but unlikely even in theory) and rebel. Obviously the first thing that the government would do (if they’re not too busy writing books, that is) once they’d extracted their heads from their respective… newspapers… is send in a body of redcoats

Unlikely. On the grounds that we’re not a bunch of bloodthirsty mentalists, we’d most likely begin secession negotiations, as we would if the Scottish Government were to vote for secession.

Now all of a sudden, just as Jersey, Guernsey and all the rest have been restored to British rule, President Sarkozy announces at a press conference that the British invasion had compromised the sovereignty of the Channel Islands and pledged to protect the welfare of French citizens wherever they are (let’s assume for the purposes of this analogy that all, rather than just some, of the Channel Islanders hold French citizenship somewhere along the line). So without any further warning, the combined might of every army in the EU proceeds to swamp the Islands in European troops and opens a second and third front in the Scilly Isles and Dover respectively.

This makes the Channel Islands analogy fall down completely: while some Channel Islanders may have French names, they’re English-speaking and culturally British with no great ties to France. But let’s assume they do all have French passports and want to be French - at this point Sarkozy would be absolutely right to send French troops to Jersey; and anyone with an ounce of moral decency would have to support him.

It’s definitely a situation where the UK’s actions in preventing French people living on land they’ve owned for generations from the perfectly reasonable desire for self-determination would be so morally dubious that I’d be strongly opposed to our invasion - to the extent of going to jail for treason if necessary (and for Ostrowski’s analogy to work at all, we also need to assume that the Scilly Isles are similarly full of French passport holders who want to be French, which means that the same principle applies). Look at it this way - if you support the Irish Republic’s existence, you have to allow these imaginary Frogs the same rights…

So the only bit that I - or anyone with the slightest believe in self-determination, and generally not killing people for picking the government they’d prefer - would have a problem with is the invasion of Dover. And the only reason Mr Ostrowski mentions Dover is because he believes Russia will also annex Adjara, which is, err, nowhere near any of the fighting and full of Muslim ethnic Turks. Why does he believe this? Err, hard to say, as Russia’s showing no signs of doing so.

In other words, even someone deeply anti-Russian (a Pole? Anti-Russian? Say it ain’t so…), trying their hardest to come up with OMG WTF shocking metaphors for the UK market, fails to come up with anything beyond a demonstration that Russia’s actions are perfectly reasonable and that we ought to support them.

Update: Jamie’s piece on the Georgian army’s utterly insane behaviour is a better guide to what the hell’s going on than any OMG THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING! narrative.

I found this lurking in one of my outboxes, and though it deserved an airing:

In the course of a single Crooked Timber thread, I seem to have come worryingly close to defending both genocide and forced child marriage

More than usual, please read the rest…

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Blogger Lenin has some impartial [*] words on the future for the Caucasus after the current willy-waving:

a new Brzezinski-advised Obama administration would certainly focus far more intently on shoring up US power in Central Asia than continuing to fight the lost battle in Iraq.

It’s what we should have been doing for the last 15 years; would be nice if we were to give it a go now…

[*] at least, a hell of a lot more so than most Western press comment or than you’d expect from his blog-name.

I don’t normally post idiot comments from CiF here, but this one seems to sum up a popular meme of which I have literally no comprehension:

“[Hating immigrants and refugees is] nothing to do with racism, its to do with national self interest, and putting the interersts of your own citiizens first and foremost, and above those of citiizens from other countries.”

But that’s the definition of racism! If you think that it’s right to put English people’s interests (or British people’s interests) ahead of other people’s interests, you are saying that it’s right to disadvantage people who don’t belong to the English cultural group in favour of people who do. And believing it’s right to disadvantage one cultural group in favour of another, backed up by spurious notions of genetics, is simply what racism is.

Anti-immigrationists, BNP supporters and their ilk should say “I am a racist, because I think British people are brilliant and everyone else is rubbish; you should be one too, because we’re British together and it’s brilliant”. Since they’re too slimy and dishonest to do so, everyone else should bear in mind that this is precisely what every statement they make boils down to…

Just like the way the government has decided on the sites of new nuclear power stations despite the consultation process not having finished yet, so - despite the consultation on Heathrow’s third runway still taking place - Business Secretary John Hutton seems to have already decided that it will go ahead.

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